Formulating challenges to scaffold teamwork: Experiences from Nordic innovation course

A central component of challenge-based learning are the challenges which scaffold a learning process. Considering the importance of these challenges, there are surprisingly few guidelines on how to formulate such challenges so that they may scaffold the learning process in the desired way. In this paper, we therefore explore experiences over the past 10 years with´formulating real-life challenges, instructing external stakeholders (such as companies or NGOs) and conveying challenges to the students, in order to extrapolate general guidelines
for how to formulate challenges so they support constructive alignment in challenge-based learning courses. As a case study, we use a large course on innovation, which brings together engineering students from 18 different engineering disciplines, where they are tasked to work in interdisciplinary teams and develop innovative solutions to a real-life challenge.