A Greedy Algorithm Assignment of Capstone Course Students to Teams and Projects Using Skill Heuristics

Collaborative project work is an increasingly prevalent pedagogy across nearly all academic and vocational disciplines. However, there are many variables involved in the formation of teams when choosing from a pool of students... [ view full abstract ]

Collaborative project work is an increasingly prevalent pedagogy across nearly all academic and vocational disciplines. However, there are many variables involved in the formation of teams when choosing from a pool of students with widely varied skills and levels of experience, leaving many instructors no choice but to use time consuming superficial grouping methods or simply allow students to self-group for team projects. This paper describes a comparative analysis of the skill distributions of teams formed conventionally and teams formed programmatically, using target skill distribution heuristics and a greedy assignment algorithm. Test populations for this comparison came from two courses that utilize group project work as the primary course deliverable – an information systems graduate Capstone Project course of 40 students and an Introduction to Computing for Non-Computing Majors undergraduate course of 105 students.