Facilitated teambuilding processes to enhance teamwork skills in engineering education

Teamwork skills are essential for engineers, as they often collaborate across disciplines and - in increasingly digitalized settings - across cultural backgrounds. This requires universities to teach their engineering students the respective soft skills. Hence, this paper explores how the acquisition of such competences can be integrated into the structure of the courses Engineering Mechanics and Computational Mechanics. The components of the framework enable the students to work in small group settings in which they receive guidance by a facilitator. A facilitator supports the students in engaging in continuous reflective practices. Qualitative and quantitative assessments show that the approach was successful in furthering the students' development of teamwork and communication skills. The components of the framework can easily be adapted to other courses and universities to better prepare the students for their future professional practice.