A novel approach to teaching teamwork

Teamwork is widely recognised as an important skill both generally and in the context of the computing industry. The majority of approaches to teaching teamwork are "practically" based and in higher education are often designed to run over a number of weeks. We required an approach that would work over a concentrated period of five days during the early stages of a postgraduate course. The teamwork element forms part of a study skills module and helps the transition to postgraduate study. This research explores our chosen approach, the use of a business game simulation. We have used this new approach with several groups of students and have analysed both the students' and tutors' feedback as a result of their experiences. The analysis demonstrates that this is a successful approach for teaching teamwork and that it has a number of additional benefits.