Balancing scaffolding and complexity in open ended group projects (OEGPs)

There is a gap between the problems our students typically encounter in their education and the problems they are likely to be asked to solve in their future employments. Real-world problems are often ill- structured (open ended) and we argue that working on well-structured problems, as is common in educational settings of today, does not fully prepare students for the problems they will encounter in their professional life. This paper will focus on the use of Open Ended Group projects as an educational setting and address why it can be useful in reaching general goals of engineering education and how scaffolding can balance the inherent complexity of such educational settings.