What´s your contribution? An online system for assessing each member´s participation in team based projects

Team based subjects in Engineering occur within the School of Electrical, Computer and Telecommunications Engineering in second and third year undergraduate degrees. In such subjects, students work in teams of between five and ten students to propose and develop engineered products for a target market place (chosen from different themes) with a small budget allocated for purchasing materials and devices. In practice, all students cannot make exactly the same contribution as each other, so a system to allocate marks for individual´s contribution has been previously developed and employed within the school. This system is called the Fair Contribution Sheet (FCS) and a paper-based form has been developed and deployed within these subjects for many years. This paper outlines the FCS system and describes the development of an electronic form based equivalent, which was first deployed in 2010. The deployed system was developed using Java and Java Server pages (JSP). A survey of students, who used this software, was conducted. Some of these students had previously used the paper-based FCS and their perception of the differences between the electronic and paper based versions, along with other results, are presented in this paper. The paper also compares the use of the paper and electronic versions from the viewpoint of the subject coordinator.