Team projects are a way to expose students to conflicting project objectives, and "[t]here should be a strong real-world element … to ensure that the experience is realistic" [ACM/IEEE-CS 2015b]. Team projects provide students an opportunity to put their education into practice and prepare them for their professional careers. The aim of this special issue is to collect and share evidence about the state-of-practice of team projects in computing education and to help educators in designing and running team projects. From a record number of 69 submitted abstracts, 19 were invited to submit a full paper. Finally, nine papers were accepted for publication in this and a subsequent issue. The articles presented in the present issue cover the following topics: real projects for real clients, open source projects, multidisciplinary team projects, student and team assessment, and cognitive and psychological aspects of team projects.