Brief description

Project activities are an important component of the innovative development trend. Skillful project team building influences the efficiency of all work, so it is critical to understand roles of team members. This understanding will help put together an efficient group and improve the quality of decision-making on group management. Roles can be defined through a number of tests, but actual practical activities represent a more reliable source of information. A WebQuest is an umbrella term for various online and offline events in this format based on game mechanics. A number of solutions within the WebQuest allow defining students’ roles in the team in the course of practical activities with a high level of engagement in the game. This approach has been studied in this article. The article presents assessments of roles with the help of the following indicators: the player’s speed of response as compared with other team members; differences between answers within the group; the order of answers given, etc. Additionally, the project allows testing during the game, and that makes it possible to find out the participants’ (players’) opinions about the current distribution of roles in the team. Aside from studying the results of the event and collecting data on the aforementioned hypotheses, it is planned to compare the obtained results with other generally accepted team role tests, and the actual results of student team project activities in the framework of a special university course – Introduction to Project Management. Therefore, the main focus of the study is to check the hypothesis that roles of participants in university project teams can be selected through student games in a specially arranged short-term playing environment at the university.