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Assign teams.  Otherwise it might become like a popularity contest, and some students might feel bad.  Also, some students are shy, and would be hesistant to ask others to be on their team.

For future activities, switch the team members around.

Hi Melissa!

I think assigning teams is the perfect 'real world' scenario that children can be put in. When they get into their careers outside of school, they often cannot choose who they work with, as much as they would like to. This is quite common in the STEM field as well, which fits perfectly with your lesson on engineering teams. Not only is it a real world scenario, but as others have mentioned, some students get anxiety when having to choose their own partners since they may not be very social or not know anyone in the classroom. It is always important to give students choice, however, there is always a time and a place for it, and I believe in this case, it would be best for them to be assigned!