Abstract For more than a decade, the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at MIT has offered undergraduate students the opportunity of conceiving, developing, implementing and operating new spacecraft's missions. During a three term class, junior and senior students experience all the challenges of a true engineering team project: design, analysis, testing, technical documentation development, team management, and leadership. Leadership instruction is an important part of the curricula; through the development of leadership skills, students learn to manage themselves and each other in a more effective way, increasing the overall productivity of the team. Also, a strong leadership education is a key factor in improving the abilities of future engineers to be effective team members and leaders in the companies and agencies in which they will work. However, too often leadership instruction is presented in an abstract way, which does not provide students with suggestions for immediate applicability. As a consequence, students underestimate the potential that leadership education can have on the development of their projects. To counteract that effect, a new approach for teaching “practical” leadership has been developed. This approach is composed of a set of activities developed to improve students' leadership skills in the context of a project. Specifically, this approach has been implemented in the MIT satellite development class. In that class, students experienced the challenges of building two satellites: CASTOR and Exoplanet. These two missions are real space projects which will be launched in the next two years, and which involve cooperation with different entities (MIT, NASA, and Draper). Hence, the MIT faculty was interested in developing leadership activities to improve the productivity of the teams in a short time. In fact, one of the key aspects of the approach proposed is that it can be quickly implemented in a single semester, requiring no more than 4h of activity. Data collected show that the approach improved the ability of students to interact productively with each other. This suggests that the activity can also be used in different contexts where a rapid and effective way of improving leadership and team membership is required. The article presents an overview of MIT satellite development class and of the two missions used as test cases, a detailed description of the leadership approach implemented, and of the results obtained.
Highlights ► We developed a module to teach leadership in satellite development class. ► Module matches leadership education with real satellites projects. ► Module is focused on providing quick suggestion of practical applicability. ► Results show that the module helped students to understand of team leadership. ► Faculty and mentors noticed also improvements in the team accomplishments.
Teaching practical leadership in MIT satellite development class: CASTOR and Exoplanet projects
Acta Astronautica ; 77 ; 138-148
2012-03-13
11 pages
Aufsatz (Zeitschrift)
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
Teaching practical leadership in MIT satellite development class: CASTOR and Exoplanet projects
Online Contents | 2012
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