Facilitated team-building processes to enhance teamwork skills in engineering education

Engineers work in interdisciplinary and increasingly digital teams. While higher education institutions focus on transmitting hard skills to prospective engineers, they do not prioritize teaching relevant soft skills, such as teamwork and communication skills. This paper describes a framework of various teambuilding components and processes which integrates the development of those skills into the existing structures of the courses Engineering Mechanics and Computational Mechanics. In different learning scenarios, facilitators guide the students through group development processes and enable them to learn from their experiences by means of reflective practices. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that the students acquired additional social skills while participating in these courses. The components of the framework can easily be adapted to other courses and universities to better prepare the students for their future professional practice.