Experiences Using Team Projects in a Freshman Database Course

Over the past three semesters, a term project completed by student teams has been incorporated into a freshman course that introduces the design and construction of relational databases.After each semester the students were surveyed about their perception regarding the usefulness and logistics of the team experience.Each semester used a slightly different approach to the project.At the end of the third semester, students in advanced courses that required team projects were surveyed about the usefulness of the earlier experience.The purpose of the experiment was to investigate how one might adequately manage a large team project whose team members are freshmen and whether or not large team projects are useful at the freshman level.This paper describes the projects, the management and assessment of the teams, the instructor's perception of the experience and the results of the student surveys.