Collaborative Learning for Innovation Education

This paper describes a study on collaborative learning during a month-long innovation project course offered to a group of engineering, technology, and innovation students in the summer of 2019. We present survey data aimed at understanding student attitudes and team performance dynamics, including the biggest challenges faced by students, the evolution of student confidence levels throughout the course, and the students’ self-organization and team dynamics. Students reported high degrees of success in achieving the goals that they had for taking the class, as well as steadily increasing confidence across a wide variety of competencies relating to the innovation process. Students also generally reported successful project team experiences, although teams that had a clear idea of how to divide their time between team-based and individual work report better team functionality than those that did not.