Intercollegiate Student Design Projects: Lessons Learned by Four Universities.

Four Universities (Baylor University, University of Dayton, University of Detroit Mercy and Villanova University) have piloted a series of collaborative intercollegiate senior design projects where students from different schools collaborate on senior projects. Nearly a dozen projects were undertaken over two years. The level of collaboration for different projects varied from working together to create a single prototype to working independently to build multiple prototypes. A number of lessons were learned including the value of having periodic face-to-face (non video) meetings. Also, project complexity seems to have a positive effect on the collaboration while simple projects enabled the teams to abandon communication and build independent prototypes. In all, collaborative design projects proved to be highly valuable from the student perspective although not free of frustrations. Faculty also observed the pedagogical value of collaborative projects but there was no consensus as to if or how much extra work is required to administer them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]