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Using Team Time Cards to Encourage Accountability in Senior Design Projects

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Conference

2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Tampa, Florida

Publication Date

June 15, 2019

Start Date

June 15, 2019

End Date

June 19, 2019

Conference Session

Design in Engineering Education Division: Capstone Design Practices

Tagged Division

Design in Engineering Education

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

14

DOI

10.18260/1-2--33519

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/33519

Download Count

396

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Paper Authors

biography

Kimberly B. Demoret P.E. Florida Institute of Technology Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-1478-6334

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Kimberly Demoret is responsible for the Aerospace Engineering capstone design program at the Florida Institute of Technology, where she has been an Assistant Professor since 2015. Prior to joining Florida Tech, she worked for eight years at Kennedy Space Center on development of launch systems in support of NASA's space exploration goals. She also spent 20 years in the Air Force as a developmental engineer and manager, earning her PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology in 1994. Her current research interests include engineering education, student motivation and retention, and the psychology of student teams. She is a retired Lieutenant Colonel and a licensed professional engineer in the State of Florida.

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Abstract

In senior design projects, it is often a challenge to hold all students on a team accountable for their fair share of the work, and the problem becomes worse for large teams. A “Team TimeCard” system has been developed that provides both the instructor and team members more visibility on the efforts and contribution of each student working on a senior design project. In the system, each member of the team records weekly project activities and hours worked, and the team leader consolidates and uploads the data as a single team deliverable that all members can see. The instructor uses data from the team time cards along with peer feedback results and faculty observations to generate an instructor evaluation grade for each student twice a semester, and students can use the time cards as input to their peer feedback evaluations. Initial results with three cohorts of aerospace engineering senior design teams are encouraging; the Team TimeCard system appears be a useful tool to confront “social loafing” or “freeriding”- where some students fail to contribute their fair share of the work. This system may be particularly helpful for Capstone instructors with large classes and large teams who are seeking greater visibility on team processes and more quantifiable data for evaluating individual effort.

Demoret, K. B. (2019, June), Using Team Time Cards to Encourage Accountability in Senior Design Projects Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--33519

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