ON THE IMPORTANCE OF PEER INSTRUCTION IN GROUP DESIGN PROJECTS

This paper is focused on the importance of peer instruction in a collaborative design project and particularly on the knowledge transfer between fourth year (project managers) and second year (design engineers) students. A subtle change introduced in the last two years was that the prototype requirements for the second year teams were the same as the requirements that the fourth year project managers had to meet two years previously. This had a positive impact on the esteem of the project managers and increased their self-confidence allowing them to provide more relevant technical guidance to the second year students during the project. As a result, design teams were more likely to produce functioning prototypes, which also met a greater proportion of the design requirements. In order to understand the reasons behind the improved performance of the teams, the fourth year students were asked to assess their confidence and capability to manage design group projects in a survey. The results of this survey and its findings are presented in this work.