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The student teams are assembled randomly insuring that existing friendships do not play a role in the team organization. This more closely simulates an industrial setting where participants are forced to work with existing personnel and resources. The student teams are also prohibited from “firing” a team member because industrially it would cost too much time and money to find a replacement.

To add another dimension of reality, a business school finance major is assigned to each team to assess and enforce loaded cost figures. This forces the team members to think in real financial terms and to more carefully budget their efforts.

The final projects are presented to “the company” (a selected group of faculty) where a formal presentation and a prototype are delivered.

Introduction:

One of the key differentiators between engineering and engineering technology is the “industrial” flavor of the latter. Northeastern University is recognized as one of the pioneers of cooperative education where industrial experience is integrated into the curriculum. But good preparation for the coop experience is necessary if both student and company are to benefit. Over the years, coop jobs have migrated from intrinsically simple tasks to relatively important functions where students actually join a project team and make significant contributions. Preparing them for these kinds of jobs requires more than the teaching of technical skills. Students must learn about group dynamics, teamwork and the acquisition and integration of new knowledge. Rather than depending exclusively upon on-the-job training, several courses have been designed to directly prepare the student for the industrial experience.

One of these is a course in software engineering wherein students are assembled into project teams of five members and given traditional industrial projects to complete. The students for this course were middlers (students between traditional sophomore and junior years) and have limited programming experience although all have taken at least one programming course (generally C++ and often Visual Basic). The limited experience forces the team to rely more heavily on the more technically astute members and is typical of what might be found in an industrial setting where a project that is outside the group’s technical comfort zone may have to completed in a short period of time. The entire program is based on an industrial model and has three converging goals:

1. create a team-building environment 2. develop a unique prototype using the team 3. teach the principles of good software engineering practices

Creating a Team-Building Environment:

The individual teams were chosen at random. In an industrial setting, team members generally do not have the opportunity to choose the members of their teams and the random selection process

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Weinstein, J. R. (2000, June), Simulating Industry In The Classroom Paper presented at 2000 Annual Conference, St. Louis, Missouri. 10.18260/1-2--8699