New directions for a junior-level projects course

A paper at FIE´95 described a new projects course for juniors. Students worked in teams of 3-4 to complete a project in one semester. The second offering of the course has added significant changes. An arbitrary grouping into teams based on a short questionnaire has replaced self-selection. This has reduced personality problems. Rather than each team doing the entire project, each team chooses a sub-project. The entire class, (7 teams), together produced a single implementation of the final project. While reducing the per-student load and cost, this led to far more realistic, industry-like coordination problems between groups. The course focus has further shifted to teaching project management and coordination. Students spent the last half of the semester also planning individual projects to be carried out over the following two semesters. The first group planning experience helps in the planning process for the individual projects