Developing Global Teamwork Skills: The Runestone Project

The Runestone project is a collaborative course currently offered by Universities in Sweden, Finland, and China. The course provides a unique opportunity for third year engineering students from a variety of programs to experience the opportunities and challenges that international teamwork involves. Teams composed of students from two countries work intensively over a 10 to 13 week project cycle to develop a system which allows a user to remote-control a LEGO NXT robot. The teams negotiate the features of their final system with the academic supervisors from the participating Universities, propose a development time-frame and deliverables, and develop and demonstrate a prototype system.