Problem-based learning techniques involving small collaborative teams of students are widely regarded as being effective in teaching engineering design courses. However, the heavy requirements upon the teaching staff to support and coordinate such teams typically limit these courses to small numbers of students. In this paper, we describe the design of a computer-based tool for supporting small collaborative teams with the ultimate goal of scaling these engineering design courses to larger

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... rs of students. The system, deployed on laptops with wireless networking, utilizes student self-evaluations and instrumented project management tools to provide feedback of individual and team performance to the students and teaching staff. We present an example of the usage and data collected from this system during a pilot test in an undergraduate computer science design course. Based on that experience, we discuss future plans to refine the system for early detection of problem teams and to instrument asynchronous and instant messaging tools to support social network analysis of team communication. I. Introduction Engineering design courses commonly combine traditional lecture delivery with team project assignments, where small collaborative groups of students work on a problem related to the course material. Although this is not problem-based learning as described by Barrows, many of the same benefits arise from the addition of team project work-greater interpersonal communication between students, knowledge sharing, and a degree of self-learning of new material 1 . However, while lecture delivery can scale with increasing enrollment via larger classrooms and video broadcasts, the resources required to facilitate team project work often cannot. Monitoring the progress and performance of individual teams in a course requires significant effort from the instructional staff. Often this involves identifying social loafers and mediating personal differences between students in addition to evaluating learning outcomes. Usually, the resolution of these problems and conflicts come after they have already manifested itself as degraded team performance. As enrollment increases, however, it is difficult to scale the size of the instructional staff, a scarce resource in many engineering departments. We believe that computer-based tools can be useful in assisting the teaching staff to monitor the progress and performance of teams in large engineering design courses. In the next section, we describe metrics for assessing team progress and performance. Then, we describe our computer-