First-year engineering students collaborate remotely on an IDEAs Clinic spaceship challenge
Md. Abdul Chowdhury and his teammates never did get their virtual spaceship safely to Kepler-438b, an exoplanet situated hundreds of light years from Earth.
But all the hours they spent trying certainly weren’t wasted.
Whether they were able to conquer the difficult spaceship challenge or not, about 50 first-year engineering students at the University of Waterloo came away from a recent three-day event with valuable new technical skills and experience collaborating on complex problems in groups of up to 16 people.
“Teamwork is key to everything in industry, so it was great for us to get out of our comfort zones now to help prepare us for the long run,” said Chowdhury, 19.
That was exactly what organizers had in mind when they tweaked an existing hands-on activity to engage and involve electrical and computer engineering students during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Students worked remotely in pairs and sub-groups of four within teams of 16 to program an autonomous spaceship to plot a course, dodge or destroy asteroids and reach a planet in deep space.
Pulling it off - or even getting close - required students physically located in their home communities across Canada to use a shared coding tool called Git and collaborate via video conferencing platform Microsoft Teams.
“This is probably the largest team activity they will do in their university careers,” said engineering professor Derek Rayside. “It intentionally pushes students beyond what they know and it’s way too big for one person to do it alone, so it makes teamwork essential.”
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