|
Like a corporation
Since we're trying to teach students about science and engineering, we want them to know what it's like to be an engineer. We run the team like a corporation. There's a leader for the whole team, and one leader for all of engineering and another for everything else. Then we have engineers in charge of each team (mechanical, electrical, software, web, marketing, finance, strategy, etc) and student leaders for each team. Like a corporation, the the team leaders are responsible for getting their work done and must report their status to the engineering/other leader.
I can only speak for the software teams because that's what I worked on, but this system worked out well. We got our requirements from the mechanical and electrical teams and went from there. The team leaders took charge of the high level design (with input from the students) and let the students do the actual coding (with help from the engineers), much like a senior engineer and someone who works for him. The students got exposure to the design process and got a lot of hands on experience with the code. The organization of our team also helps new engineers (like myself) get experience with high level design and management.
Mike
|