Engineering based modeling activities for enhancing student communication and teamwork skills

This paper argues for a future-oriented, inclusion of engineering modeling activities in introductory engineering courses at the university level. Engineering model eliciting activities provide a rich source of meaningful engineering problem situations that capitalise on and extend students' existing mathematics and engineering learning and provide opportunities for enhancing student communication and teamwork skills. We give consideration here to engineering modeling activities as a means for providing freshmen students with opportunities to work with real world engineering problems even in introductory courses, to develop their communication and teamwork skills, to develop and revise powerful models and to document and present their solutions. The models developed by a class of 26 first year civil engineering students in solving the Natural Gas activity are presented here. Results showed that students, working in groups, created models that adequately solved the engineering problem, and developed their communication skills. Finally, recommendations for implementing engineering modeling activities and for further research are presented.