Providing students with 'real-world' experience through university group projects

Abstract

Many tertiary institutions use project-based courses as a capstone for final year engineering, software engineering, computing and informatics students.Such courses give students an opportunity to draw together the apparently disparate learning they have undertaken during the preceding years.Students often work as members of a team, gaining team skills, as well as interacting with industry rather than academics only.In this paper we describe how we have restructured our project courses by forming teams comprising 4 th year students as team leaders and 3 rd year students.We discuss our experiences as well as evaluating the new course structure and its outcomes.We believe we have improved the outcomes for all stakeholders -students, clients and academicsand we have reduced significantly the work load of the academics involved, while gaining an improved ability to differentiate between students' contribution.