A competitive collaborative learning experience in chemical plant design

This paper reports on the experience of using collaborative learning techniques in a competition environment, which can be a proper approach in the traditionally highly demanding and competitive engineering courses, avoiding most of the drawbacks attributed to collaborative learning methods. The students were organized in contractor “companies” with several technical departments and a project manager, competing at every stage of the design process. The final result included some of the usual documentation of a professional basic engineering project. The results were good technically and well accepted by the students, but not all the drawbacks were removed.