Picture Pieces Activity: An effective Team Building Strategy

Abstract

Practice of Engineering Profession requires Engineers having the ability to work in teams. This is well articulated in Graduate Attribute 9 of Washington Accord. Furthermore, engineering problem solving requires multi-disciplinary skills. This necessitates the need for engineers to be able to work in multi-disciplinary teams. The challenge for academia is to make the "Future Engineers" to understand the need for working in teams, with multidisciplinary skills. Projects during Engineering are an important part of engineering curriculum. These projects offer learning contexts, which enhance student learning. The challenge for academia is to make the students realize the importance of "Project management" which is an art of managing the project and its deliverables with a view to produce finished products or service.Accomplishing this goal requires that all team and team members work together with a common Strategy and Goal. Keeping this in mind, an activity was designed in "Project Management" module, in a course titled "Engineering Exploration". This course is designed for freshman engineering students of undergraduate program in KLE Technological University, Hubballi. Through this activity called "Picture Pieces Activity", the authors have attempted to communicate to students.

1) The need to work in team in order to successfully accomplish a given task.

2) The factors that contribute to effective team execution of a project.

This paper shares the details of the activity, the experiences of authors and the learnings in doing this activity.