Teaching an Accelerated Course via Team Activities: Assessment and Peer Rating of the Team Impact

Engineering physics courses are the key opening courses in engineering. Most engineering students take one year of engineering physics courses. Teaching Physics is always fun, but teaching the same course content in little less than half the time in is hard for the instructors, while learning the concepts and solving problems in an accelerated pace is challenging for students. To reverse this trend, and to make learning as interesting as possible, I restructured the course with weekly in class team activities and a final team project to work outside the class. One of the objectives of this approach is to help students develop the habit of helping others to understand the basic engineering physics concepts in a give and take manner. This restructuring was tested in a small class environment and for a summer accelerated course. In this report we will present detailed information about the team’s weekly in class activities; team structure, assignment samples, time constraints, outcome and student feedback via assessment. In brief, a survey was done at the end of the semester to see how much the team’s weekly project helped students to learn course materials and help each other to make learning environment more enjoyable. The class had forty-three students of which twenty two were females and the rest were males. About fifty percent of the students were engineering majors and the rest were in other science areas. About forty students participated in the survey. The data was analyzed using a spreadsheet and the outcome will be reported in this paper. The study will benefit other educators who are looking for impactful teaching methods.