In 2006, the Department of Civil Engineering at Rose Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT) initiated international collaboration with Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology (KNUST), Ghana.  In the first form of this collaboration, each institution pursued its own design itinerary but both partner institutions used the same problem and design objectives. The disadvantage with such a model is that the course instructors in both institutions provided the necessary information for the successful completion of the project. Therefore, the project happened orthogonally and feedback received from the students indicated a lack of cultural experience between the students at both institutions. Based on this feedback, the next model pursued consisted of a parallel design project in which the student teams from both institutions worked independently on the same project but they were encouraged to share and discuss data and ideas to solving the problem. Finally, a “Joint Project Model” was implemented. For this project model, Rose-Hulman students were paired with KNUST students to design a project in Ghana as one cohesive team.  This paper discusses some of the challenges associated with the “Joint Project Model” and also offers potential solutions to these challenges.

The structure of engineering capstone design courses vary  both between institutions and within a institution from the perspective of faculty engagement, industry involvement, and course learning objectives. In this paper we present a summary of an ongoing study focused on assessing engineering skills pre- and postcapstone experience in two institutions where the course structures are different. These engineering skills are self-assessed by both students and industry sponsors involved with the mentorship of these projects in their organizations. The study we describe will assess the impact of pedagogical approaches and course structures on skill development and project success.  The objective of our study is to identify high impact teaching practices by comparing the structured and unstructured capstone courses at two universities. 

A unique interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to project-based learning within the capstone course is a key aspect of preparing civil engineering students for professional practice at the university of Wisconsin-madison department of civil & environmental engineering the focus of this senior-level capstone course is to immerse students in a situation where they work on a real-world design challenge in mentored cross-curricular collaboration with students in other disciplines. through synergistic projects, students from diverse disciplines work collaboratively from project inception through completion providing positive impacts upon student outcomes and expectations. This includes students from the fields of engineering, architecture, and landscape architecture. The focus of this paper is to delineate and illustrate the unique aspects of this capstone course.

All engineering students at Seattle University are required to complete a nine month long, team based, externally sponsored senior design project. In the past decade civil engineering design teams have completed eight projects for clients outside the USA. This paper describes the projects, provides details of recruitment, implementation, and partnerships with organizations.  It discusses the benefits to students, project challenges and the overall lessons learned. 

The Mechanical and Industrial Engineering department at Northeastern University has been trying to increase multidisciplinary projects in the capstone design course. Projects incorporating multiple disciplines can involve multidisciplinary students working in series or parallel, interdisciplinary collaboration between disciplines on a common project, or transdisciplinary teams where members need to develop knowledge outside of their own discipline. Examination of past teams involving more than one discipline shows that transdisciplinary teams tend to perform higher on certain metrics compared to multi- and interdisciplinary teams. This implies that projects that require students to gain substantial knowledge outside their discipline can lead to more sophisticated and complete designs, provided expert knowledge and mentoring in the outside discipline is available. 

The Engineering programs at Liberty University consist of Electrical, Computer, and Industrial & Systems Engineering. All programs funnel through a multidisciplinary two-semester senior capstone design sequence.  However, the two-course sequence is preceded by an introductory engineering design course intended to prepare and evaluate students prior to assigning them to project teams.  This design course is offered during the spring semester prior to the fall/spring semester capstone sequence, in effect serving as a third course in the capstone design sequence or alternatively, a pre-capstone course.   Prior to the 2011/2012 academic year, this introductory design course was used to simply introduce design and project management principles to juniors prior to enrolling into a discipline-specific, two-semester capstone sequence.  However, the potential for forming multidisciplinary project teams resulted in the replacement of discipline-specific capstone course sequences with a single multidisciplinary capstone sequence.  In addition to this change, the junior level introductory engineering design course was tailored to prepare students for their capstone project (as well as assess individual students to identify those who exhibit good leadership qualities, and assess the team dynamics of different combinations of students.)  This article is written to highlight the benefits and challenges of this three course approach. 

The Bachelor of Science in Information Technology (BSIT) program at the University of Cincinnati has a senior capstone requirement which is two semesters long. There are two co-requisite courses (3 credits each) that all students must successfully complete: a project management class and a technical advising class. When the university was on the quarter system the technical advising class was not started until the Winter quarter and continued through the Spring quarter while the project management class lasted all three quarters. The technical advising at that time was more ad hoc and fluid with most of the faculty participating as advisors, creating a lower student-faculty ratio. Since going to semesters, it was decided that the technical advising would be part of the process beginning in the Fall semester. That and the decision to have only one Software track technical advisor and one Networking track technical advisor has created a different set of challenges. Today, a new model needs to be developed. The paper will look at the challenges faced and how the faculty members involved have begun to address these issues including the future of the technical advisors role in our students’ capstone experience. 

The learning and teaching methodology of the capstone final year engineering project (FYEP) as employed in Australia is presented and discussed in this paper. A questionnaire was conducted to answer a broad research question: What is the current approach used in learning and teaching of capstone FYEPs? The questionnaire outcomes and a number of common issues, discrepancies and inconsistencies found are outlined in the paper. The study indicates the need to engage in further dialogue with supervisors, professors and students to develop best practice in the FYEP paradigm.

Now in its ninth year, Franklin W. Olin College’s Senior Capstone Program in Engineering (SCOPE) has grown and evolved into a stable, industry-sponsored capstone program. Based on feedback, sponsors are highly satisfied with project results and the majority of students feel they have had rewarding and challenging engineering experience. We have found that one of the most important factors to which students attribute their success is the team experience. In this paper, we discuss the preparation for advanced teamwork that students receive in their first three years of the curriculum, our unique team formation process, the role of peer- and self-feedback, and our approaches to supporting teams.

The Engineering programs at Liberty University consist of Electrical, Computer, and Industrial & Systems Engineering. All programs funnel through a multidisciplinary two-semester senior capstone design sequence.  However, the two-course sequence is preceded by an introductory engineering design course intended to prepare and evaluate students prior to assigning them to project teams.  This design course is offered during the spring semester prior to the fall/spring semester capstone sequence, in effect serving as a third course in the capstone design sequence or alternatively, a pre-capstone course.   Prior to the 2011/2012 academic year, this introductory design course was used to simply introduce design and project management principles to juniors prior to enrolling into a discipline-specific, two-semester capstone sequence.  However, the potential for forming multidisciplinary project teams resulted in the replacement of discipline-specific capstone course sequences with a single multidisciplinary capstone sequence.  In addition to this change, the junior level introductory engineering design course was tailored to prepare students for their capstone project (as well as assess individual students to identify those who exhibit good leadership qualities, and assess the team dynamics of different combinations of students.)  This article is written to highlight the benefits and challenges of this three course approach.

Recognizing the complexities of modern engineered products and systems, a current engineering graduate should have knowledge, skills and attitudes from multiple disciplines as well as in-depth knowledge of a specific discipline. Additionally that graduate should be able to work in teams with those from a variety of disciplines in an interdisciplinary fashion. Since 2008, the College of Engineering at California Polytechnic State University has been offering a three quarter Interdisciplinary Senior Design Project course available to all students in the college of engineering. This paper describes the course and its interdisciplinary (not multidisciplinary) implementation. The course has evolved over the years and has become a fixture in the college of engineering with participation from students from nearly all 13 engineering majors and faculty from seven of the majors. This last year a new director of interdisciplinary projects has been established to maintain course continuity and to oversee its growth into the future. 

At Seattle University, Civil and Environmental Engineering students are required to complete a year-long, industrially-sponsored, capstone project. These projects serve as an authentic experiential learning opportunity where students learn design principles through practice. Recently, the department has worked on several structural retrofit designs of existing structures. This type of project is often more difficult than the design of new structures because it requires students to not only analyze the structures and identify deficient elements but also to develop mitigation measures that are feasible and constructible. Though challenging, retrofit design projects expose students to topics that are not covered in a standard undergraduate curriculum such as specialized software and visualization tools that can convey the design to the client clearly. To add to this, students start working on these projects before taking structural design courses and, as a result, spend much of their time learning as they go. Due to the complex nature of these projects, having a good relationship between the department and the project sponsor is important. This paper presents the students’ experiential learning experience in three structural retrofit projects sponsored by the same company as well as summarizes the best practices for these projects to be successful. 

This paper describes an ongoing effort to increase the number of students engaged in multidisciplinary capstone projects at Ohio Northern University, which began a decade ago as an initiative involving the efforts of a handful of faculty.   Over time, the number of multidisciplinary-related projects has grown such that approximately half of the senior-level students from two engineering departments are involved.  Improvements designed to engage more students both within and outside of the College of Engineering are discussed.  The paper describes the evolution of this collaborative program, and provides some lessons learned for those who are attempting to bring more multidisciplinary experiences to their students. 

This paper attempts to understand why the students need so much direction for their senior design project. It was initially hypothesized that students do not perceive the design process as being valuable or necessary, and thus don’t take it seriously or put in the desired effort. A survey was developed to assess student attitudes about the design process to see if the hypothesis was correct. However, the survey results show that the students perceive the steps in design process at the same level as the faculty. Hence, there is not enough evidence to support the hypothesis that students lack motivation because of not believing in the importance of the design process. Other causes of the problem such as difficulty in implementing the design processes were analyzed in a follow-up study. Results of follow-up survey indicate that students perceive certain parts of design process, such as generating specifications, as difficult to implement for their project. In addition, results indicate that students hesitate to put forth their best effort when resubmission is allowed. 

Capstone programs have evolved over the years from small, mostly internally sourced projects with paperbased outcomes to externally funded, industry sponsored projects delivering fully functional prototypes or test fixtures. This increased level of project sophistication and expanded cast of stakeholders has motivated academia and industry to more carefully evaluate the risks and rewards of capstone design programs.  This paper examines a handful of institutions across the country with posted policies and procedures to manage legal as well as contractual issues associated with capstone projects.  Special emphasis is given to efforts over the last five years to develop and implement such processes at the University of Idaho.  There has been a delicate balance between satisfying perceived needs by the University Counsel and by promoting exemplary service learning outcomes. Issues considered in the resulting templates for both industry and student agreements include intellectual property rights, handling confidential or sensitive information, budgeting, overhead rates, billing, indemnification, turnover of project deliverables, timing of project legal documentation, and sign-off by an authorized representative. This paper contains a first draft of a survey which the authors would like to circulate to as many engineering capstone programs as possible through activities of the 2014 Capstone Design Conference.  The ultimate goal of this investigation is definition and shared understanding of best practices associated with capstone project agreements. 

Design is widely considered a central and distinguishing activity in engineering practice.  In the context of undergraduate engineering education, capstone design is the central and distinguishing activity required by all ABET accredited engineering programs. At James Madison University, the capstone design experience is a two-year or four-semester experience where students are guided through four key phases of the design process: (1) planning and information gathering, (2) concept development, (3) embodiment design, and (4) detailed design. To guide and facilitate students through these four design phases, a Design Review process was recently implemented using Design Review Panels and four Oral Design Reviews: (1) System Requirements Review, (2) Preliminary Design Review, (3) Critical Design Review, and (4) Detailed Design Review. In this paper, we present details about the JMU Capstone Design Model, the Design Review Process, Design Review Panels, and an initial evaluation of the process provided by student and faculty responses. Overall, although still a new feature of the JMU Capstone Design Model, the Design Review process has proven to be successful in facilitating both formative and summative assessment of progress during the capstone design experience. 

In the 2013 fall semester, the Wichita State University (WSU) Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department’s capstone design course was co-taught with the Entrepreneurship (ENTR) program’s capstone course, New Venture Development. This combined class facilitated the creation of multidisciplinary teams, where teams of EECS students and ENTR students co-created a novel product aimed at satisfying a particular consumer need. After 11 unique product ideas were identified, engineering student team members labored to create a workable prototype for their product while entrepreneurship student team members validated the product idea with customers and industry experts and developed a viable business model and plan for the new product. The experience from this class revealed that product feasibility emerges over time and that tough decisions need to be made around product selection and team composition in order to maximize the potential of the product development process.

A common issue with open-ended capstone design projects is their initial definition.  That is, collecting customer requirements and turning them into verifiable engineering specifications.  There are many common difficulties with this extremely important early step in the design process.  Oftentimes sponsoring organizations are unclear in communicating the requirements, or even unaware of what they should be.  Senior students are typically not experienced in the process, and often lack a detailed understanding what’s involved in generating a complete set of engineering specifications. 
The capstone design program at California State University Chico has developed a straightforward method of project definition that is easy to understand and apply.  It is particularly useful for project sponsors that may not have completely thought through want they want the designs to do.  It is also an excellent tool for guiding inexperienced students through the process for the first time. 

The final culminating Capstone Design course provides students the opportunity to work in teams and apply their knowledge to design, build and test prototypes for solving real-world, open-ended design challenges. These challenges are at times students’ own idea or are proposed by industry sponsors or researchers and faculty. Several research studies have shown both qualitative and quantitative advantages for students by working on multidisciplinary Capstone Design projects. All schools within various colleges of Georgia Tech currently only offer the traditional mono-disciplinary Capstone Design course and hence there exists no formal channel for students to collaborate and work together on multidisciplinary Capstone Design projects.  In the absence of a multidisciplinary Capstone Design course, the transition from traditional monodisciplinary Capstone Design course raises issues of managing faculty teaching expectations, providing administrative support to faculty and students and forming multidisciplinary functional student teams. In order to assist with resolving these issues, an online portal was developed with an objective to support the implementation of multidisciplinary Capstone Design projects. Faculty and student input were solicited in order to conceptualize and develop the website to efficiently share information about multidisciplinary project ideas between students and faculty. A systematic work flow was conceived and implemented to enable formation of student teams from various schools and submission of project ‘bids’. This paper presents the design of this web portal along with a discussion on the scope for further improvement.

When a capstone course is run in a large and multi-disciplinary environment, the nature of the projects will vary.  Such is the case at the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University where at least 40 different capstone projects are run in a given cycle. The projects range from industry-based to research-based and student competition-based and include the design of both products and processes.  To manage such a large, multi-disciplinary course and to ensure that course expectations are communicated clearly to students, the course instructors have developed three strategies: (1) standardized “tracks” to accommodate three distinctly different project types; (2) a “scaffolded” project completion process; and (3) a custom-built web-based tool that facilitates communication and information flow between team members, project advisors and sponsors, and course instructors. In this paper, the authors describe and discuss these strategies. 

A Writing Fellows (WF) program has been implemented at the University of Nevada, Reno. The goal of the WF program is to develop targeted writing feedback and instruction for discipline-related communication that leverages existing university resources. Each WF is trained by the University Writing Center (UWC) and serves as a dedicated peer-reviewer who is able to provide constructive feedback on both the disciplinary content and communication aspects of each assignment. This paper reports the impacts of the initial WF implementation in the Mechanical Engineering capstone design course, which has been assessed using a variety of techniques. The assessment generally indicates positive results. In particular, students favor the continuation of the program and find it more helpful than group consultations within the UWC alone. This is due in part to having a WF engaging with students from the same discipline while developing professional writing skills. Self-assessment by the students indicates higher confidence in their communication skills. Preliminary analysis suggests that the writing fellow improved the scores of graded assignments by approximately one-third of a letter grade overall. Assessment efforts also highlight the need for deeper interaction between the WF and engineering faculty. 

Snapshot style poster sessions are just-in-time design feedback sessions where student teams prepare simple, pinned-up posters that show off in-progress status of their projects. In the author’s experience, snapshot poster sessions can satisfactorily accommodate up to 30 project teams during a single class period. The intended audience is other students in the class, faculty advisors, professional staff, nearby clients, and interested students not enrolled in the class. Minimal additional preparation time is expected for midsemester snapshot days. The idea is that project teams continue work on normal project activities for as long as possible, creating poster content in the final day before the session, reusing resources from personal logbooks and project binders. Snapshot poster sessions, scheduled several times throughout the course of a project, provide opportunities for multiple parties to provide formative assessment, share best practices, highlight common struggles, and punctuate common milestones for capstone design projects.

The iProject approach was created at Arizona State University Polytechnic campus as a mechanism to provide industry generated and funded projects, primarily for the projects utilized in the project centered courses.  The engineering program housed on the Polytechnic campus has grown from four iProjects in the 2008 capstone course to over 30 projects this year.  The process for administering the iProjects faced challenges of scalability both in growth of the program and in the diversity of projects.  This paper addresses how the engineering faculty worked with the college to address the challenges faced in scoping and mentoring iProjects for the industry-based capstone experience. 

The two innovations – new for us anyway – are (1) requiring teams to apply for the available projects as for a job, and (2) requiring a substantial prototype at about the mid point of the work. (1) has made the teams happier and I think more functional, (2) means that all teams have an encounter with the realities of the work earlier, and then sober up considerably, with time to have another go. The relationship to learning of the life habits of designers is explored a little bit. 

This paper presents the benefits of utilizing an ‘existing’, large scale, civil engineering project in a capstone design course and introduces the Civil Engineering Capstone Project Depot as a source for these projects.  Utilizing  ‘existing’ projects that have been designed and built or are waiting to be built provides the students with a significant real-world experience and allows the course instructor to control the project start date, duration, scope, and work flow.  The ‘existing’ project format also allows for the comparison of the students’ designs with the actual project design. 
 
Course instructors that obtain projects from the Civil Engineering Capstone Project Depot can eliminate the stress of finding acceptable capstone projects and can reduce their workload prior to and during the semester.  Projects available in the Civil Engineering Capstone Project Depot contain all the design calculation and reports as well as the live working MicroStation drawings, all of which have been generalized to eliminate student discovery of the actual project name and location. 

Obtaining a list of suitable projects can be a challenge for a large capstone class, particularly for an instructor teaching the course for the first time.  Linking capstone projects to faculty research can provide a significant source that provides quality projects to students and provides meaningful progress on research if properly staffed and structured. This paper describes an approach used at Oregon State University (OSU) to link capstone projects to multi-year research projects that involve graduate students.  A key aspect of this approach is structuring the capstone course to cover all steps of the design process including prototype construction and testing.  A second key aspect is placing the graduate student associated with the research project in the position of project advisor for the capstone project(s).  The use of this approach at OSU has resulted in capstone projects providing significant contributions to research through device design and creation and through the education of the supervising graduate student in engineering project and personnel management. This work demonstrates the capability of capstone design to contribute to both the larger teaching and research missions of the university.

The undergraduate software engineering program at the Rochester Institute of Technology has had a capstone project in its curriculum since its inception in 1996. These software-intensive projects, typically composed entirely of software elements, bring a heightened need to have solutions for the issue of ownership of artifacts and intellectual property generated during the project. This comes about primarily because on a software-intensive project, it is easier to create artifacts that represent notable value to the project sponsor and have embodiments of intellectual property that clearly have been reduced to practice. The approach used to handle ownership of project artifacts and intellectual property created within the context of capstone design projects is an important consideration that runs through many aspects of the project from solicitation of project proposals through to expectations on deliverables from the project team. The question of artifact ownership is one of the first ones that potential project sponsors ask. Our approach defines four project types that vary with regard to assignment of ownership of project artifacts and intellectual property. The paper also discusses adjustments made in our institution's policies to allow project agreements that streamlined the process of starting new projects.

The capstone design experience offers the greatest academic opportunity for experiential learning before undergraduate students embark on their professional engineering careers.  Industrial-sponsored engineering projects typically require a team of engineers with multidisciplinary skill sets.  Success of the project is based on the team satisfying the technical specification within the allotted budget and time frame.  Each individual team member’s performance on the project is evaluated by the project manager and his/her raise is taken from a fixed pool of funds.  Texas Christian University’s capstone design program strives to incorporate each of these facets of engineering into the students’ design experience by having a large team of 15-20 students function as a small business enterprise.  In this paper, the team structure, project schedule and individual assessment process are presented.

Every year, around fifty-five undergraduate teams of four to six students are required to complete a capstone course for the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University. Each team spends approximately five months working with an industry sponsor using the latest tools and techniques. Students actively learn by implementing the system to solve a real world problem. In addition to delivering value to the local sponsor, our students learn specialized skills currently needed in the marketplace, which might not yet be incorporated into electives and core courses. In this paper, we discuss the tradeoffs of providing students and project sponsors flexibility in designing projects while at the same time ensuring that all students are delivering consistent, assessable milestones. We will also discuss how the tools and techniques available to students are continually changing what the students are able to accomplish in a fixed amount of time.

The Engineering Education Innovation Center at The Ohio State University offers students, through its Multidisciplinary Engineering Capstone Design Program, a broad range of opportunities for both engineering and non-engineering students to work directly with industry personnel on company-sponsored product and process design projects. The Center provides students an opportunity to apply their academics and professional and practical skills to real-world problems as a member of a multidisciplinary team. The program covers all aspects of the engineering design process and helps develop several critical professional skills. The program is continually developing to enrich the experience and better prepare the students for their careers. Most recent efforts included distributing a survey to program alumni that focused on the impacts of the program’s learning objectives to prepare students for their professional careers and its impacts with Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technologies Criteria. This paper addresses the survey results on post-graduates ratings of learning objectives based on the importance to their professional career and preparedness through their academic experiences. Comparisons are made to similar survey ratings from a larger population from the College of Engineering alumni, providing insight into the impacts of the multidisciplinary program’s structure relative to the College as a whole. 

The Capstone Design Expo is the crowning achievement in the undergraduate career of engineering students at the Georgia Institute of Technology and an opportunity to compete for substantial prizes. As coordinators of this event, it is imperative that we award prizes fairly and with much consideration. In the past, we have recorded scores from volunteer judges on paper ballots and tallied them by hand or using a scanner. These methods have been increasingly optimized, but are still labor intensive and require constant monitoring and maintenance. In the Fall semester of 2013, we developed and deployed a new web-based mobile voting system to streamline this process. Here, we describe the technical advantages of using this system and its underlying architecture, as well as the benefits to both students and Expo coordinators. An entirely mobile system such as this will scale easily to any size, allowing event organizers to focus on interactions with teams and important partners. We also show how an entirely web-based system allows for easy offline analysis of demographic and procedural data.

For over 30 years, Louisiana State University has had a two-semester Capstone Design course in the Mechanical Engineering (ME) Department.  Within the last 3 years, that experience has expanded to other departments, as well. Currently, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Biological Engineering (BE) participate in similar sequences and have students that participate in interdisciplinary projects with ME students.  Observations of the students indicated that a need for introducing teamwork and leadership coaching to the students participating in interdisciplinary projects. Teamwork, mentoring and leadership coaching are currently offered in the College of Engineering’s Peer Mentoring program.  This interdisciplinary program is designed for all levels of students.  These students tend to become team leaders and usually have better communication skills than their peers. These experiences have led to an effort to introduce teamwork and leadership coaching across the engineering curriculum. 

Capstone Design is a challenge in a number of areas, including assessment and valuation. With ABET’s current emphasis on measuring the achievement of Student Outcomes, many programs rely heavily on the capstone design course to assess and evaluate outcomes performance. This form of a program-centered nature of capstone design courses can conflict with a student-centered emphasis within capstone design courses. Similar conflicts can exist in capstone design courses that are process-focused as opposed to being project-focused. A third form of conflict can manifest itself in the realm of balancing team assessment and evaluations with assigning individual student grades. This paper explores these three areas of potential conflict in capstone design courses and the resulting compromises that result when their resolution is optimized. A list of best practices associated with assessing and evaluating student performance in capstone design is presented to extend the dialog on measuring student performance in capstone design courses. 

In a project-based engineering course whose only formal written deliverable is a team-authored report, providing students with a robust individual-writing experience is no easy feat. But this has been the challenge in the mechanical, industrial and manufacturing engineering (MIME) capstone design course at Oregon State University. MIME Capstone Design doubles as the designated writing-intensive (WI) course for MIME majors, and as such it must satisfy the associated university-wide WI requirements—including a specification that individual writing accounts for at least 25% of students’ final course grade. Using an iteratively developed project report in which students are assigned specific authorial and editorial roles and that includes multiple feedback-and-revision cycles has helped in meeting this challenge. A self-assessment and goal-setting tool called the Capstone Communication Inventory is also part of the individual-writing solution. At the beginning of the course, students use this tool to identify personal communication goals, and then they work on those goals as part of their capstone experience. Incorporation of these complementary strategies requires careful orchestration and follow-through, and in the large MIME capstone class is facilitated by inclusion of a communication specialist in the instructional mix. Writing grade improvements and anecdotal evidence suggest the approach is working and may be of interest to other capstone instructors seeking to incorporate an individual writing experience in their courses.

This paper outlines a general method that is utilized in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering (MechSE) at the University of Illinois to formulate capstone design projects that promote experiential learning in accordance with Kolb’s experiential learning theory.  Namely, capstone projects should have a sponsor who will provide the students with a concrete experience through a real design project that they care about, constructive feedback on their designs, realistic design constraints, and a reasonable scope for the duration of the project, team size, and constituents.  In addition, projects should have design reviews whereby the students can receive feedback on their designs to enable reflective observation and abstract conceptualization.  The deliverables should include reports and presentations to provide venues for constructive feedback, and prototypes and test data to facilitate active experimentation.  It is necessary to have proper facilities and resources to support the projects if the students are to build and test their designs. This paper further outlines how these methods are used by the MechSE Department in formulating engineering competition, industrial, humanitarian, and entrepreneurial projects for experiential learning.

Capstone projects represent the culmination of an undergraduate engineering degree and are typically the last gatekeeping measure before students graduate and enter the engineering profession. In Australia there is a longstanding interest in and commitment to developing quality capstone experiences. A national study into the supervision and assessment of capstone projects has determined that whilst there is relative consistency in terms of what project tasks are set and assessed, there is not comparable consistency in how these tasks or assignments are marked. Two interconnected areas of assessing process and the role of the supervisor in marking are identified as contentious. This paper presents some findings of a national case study and concludes that whilst further investigation is warranted, assessing process as well as project products is valuable as is the need for greater acceptance of project supervisors as capable of making informed, professional judgments when marking significant project work. 

Global innovation requires collaboration between groups of people located in different parts of the world, and is a growing trend in industry. Virtual teams are often used to manage new product development projects.  These teams are similar to traditional teams but are geographically separated and rely heavily on virtual methods of communication (email, Skype, teleconferencing, etc.) instead of regular face-to-face meetings.  Experience working as a member of a virtual capstone design team can help prepare students for this growing trend.  To begin preparing students for work on virtual teams in industry, we co-advised two virtual capstone design projects with students from Marquette University and Smith College.  This paper describes our experience with managing two virtual capstone design project teams across institutions.  Presented here are the challenges we encountered, the lessons we learned as a result of this experience, as well our recommendations for others who might want to include virtual project teams in their capstone design courses.  We also include retrospective feedback from the students on these teams regarding their perceived value of their virtual team experience to their careers in engineering. 

Creativity, invention, and innovation are values championed as central pillars of engineering education, particularly in Capstone Design courses. However, university environments that foster open-ended designbuild projects are uncommon. In addition, fabrication and prototyping spaces at the university level are more like ‘machine shops’ where capstone students must contract out their actual building activities.  The desire to make design and prototyping more integral to the capstone experience led to the creation of  The Invention Studio, a free-to-use, 3000 ft2 maker space and culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Though initially founded specifically for the Capstone Design course, the Invention Studio has taken on a life and culture of its own, far beyond just a capstone design prototyping lab.  There, 500 student users per month hang out, create things (using $1M of capital equipment), meet, and mentor each other for at least 25 courses as well as independent projects. The Invention Studio is centrally managed and maintained by an undergraduate student group with support from the university staff and courses.  Herein, the underlying motivation, organization, facilities, safety, funding, and intellectual property policies are described in an effort to guide others in the creation of such an environment. The Invention Studio’s facilities, infrastructure, and cultural transformation are demonstrating the value and sustainability of hands-on, design-build education to stimulate innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship in engineering undergraduates, in capstone design courses and beyond.    

A standard project format is described for graduate systems engineering capstone projects.  Each section of the outline is described and references provided to supporting material given to the students. 

In order to address complex and multi-disciplinary world problems, it is necessary to create a diverse engineering work force composed of competent and creative individuals prepared to meet current and future global challenges. The entrepreneurial skillset has become increasingly important in this area; the vocational skills that a student learns can be augmented by an understanding of how business operates as well as an appreciation that enterprise skills can be applied within an organization. Traditional university programs lack the teaching methods to turn today’s students into innovative and creative leaders who can integrate both the engineering and business skills necessary to succeed in this technology driven global economy.  The developed curriculum integrates engineering skills with entrepreneurial creativity by placing engineering and business students on the same projects in the same physical space to facilitate cross-pollination of knowledge in a collaborative learning environment to create technology savvy entrepreneurs.  This paper outlines the curriculum framework, a discussion of the resources required, overviews of typical industry projects, a discussion of evaluation criteria, and a discussion of the benefits. 

Peer review and assessment have become increasingly popular in engineering design education, mostly to evaluate individuals’ contribution to a team project.  In some cases, peer review is also encouraged between design project individuals/teams to foster learning and cooperation, similar to the traditional ‘studio’ method in architecture.  Borrowing from the architecture studio paradigm, and with the goal of increasing between-team interactions, a pilot implementation of joint progress update meetings was launched in a management engineering capstone design course. Project teams were paired based on topic similarity. In biweekly progress update meetings, teams took turns presenting to and critiquing each other’s presentation and design progress. The format was well-received by students and was successful in increasing the diversity and wealth of knowledge teams could draw from during the meetings. An increase in the number of ideas generated in the initial design phase was also noted. Finally, the new format strongly encouraged inter-team interactions, collaboration, and competition. Although some questions remain with respect to what an ideal implementation would look like, the format will be reused and refined in future course offerings.

This paper attempts to explain the rare participation of chemical engineering students on interdisciplinary design teams.  It discusses the distinctions between chemical engineering design education and the design education in other engineering curricula.  Chemical engineering students learn how to design processes to manufacture chemical products.  Other engineering students focus on how to create new products – not how to manufacture them.  Having presented these distinctions, this paper concludes with issues (problems) to be addressed in seeking to create better balanced interdisciplinary design teams.      
 
Undergraduate chemical engineering curricula cover material and energy balances, chemical thermodynamics of processing systems, transport phenomena (fluid mechanics, and heat and mass transfer) in chemical processes, separation processes, and the design of chemical reactor processes.  In their capstone design course(s), nearly all curricula cover process design; that is, the design of manufacturing processes using the basic principles taught in the core chemical engineering courses.  Over the past decade, capstone design courses have begun to introduce strategies for the design of chemical products (e.g., thin-glass substrates for LCDs, microfluidic labs-on-a-chip, and hemodialysis devices); that is, strategies for designing chemical products that satisfy consumer needs.  While many chemical engineers design these products in industry, however, due to time-constraints and difficulties generalizing their complex technology platforms, most capstone design courses focus on process design alone, integrating engineering science concepts to design manufacturing processes.    In contrast, other engineering curricula focus on the design of new prototype products, often multidisciplinary in nature, involving mechanical, materials, biotechnology, electrical and computing system components.  Their students create working prototypes, but don't design the processes to manufacture them, permitting an assessment of their economic feasibility.  Due to these differences in design emphasis, opportunities for the participation of chemical engineering seniors in interdisciplinary design projects are limited.

Directing an industrially-sponsored capstone program can be difficult for faculty members because of the multiple administrative tasks necessary to maintain effective sponsor relationships, often because of limited resources and time constraints due to other faculty responsibilities. There is a continued need for project recruiting, developing marketing and promotional programs, managing intellectual property and agreements, reviewing weekly status reports, participating in project reviews and organizing presentations and project fairs.  The mechanical engineering department at Brigham Young University created a full-time external relations director position to meet these needs and effectively coordinate between industry sponsors, the students, instructors and faculty coaches or mentors. This paper describes the responsibilities of the external relations director within the BYU Capstone program.  It also discusses how the external relations director benefits the students, faculty and industry sponsors by facilitating and encouraging the necessary relationships between them. 

The National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying has conferred Engineering Awards to 25 capstone design projects, representing 15 capstone design courses.  Most projects (92%) were local and “one off.”  Nearly all projects (98%) were sponsored by a civil engineering department or school.  Most projects were multi-discipline, with the most common engineering disciplines being structures and civil-site (76% and 64%, respectively), followed by hydrology, hydraulics, and geotechnical.  Most projects were open-ended and required preliminary design (80% and 60%, respectively).  Common non-engineering instruction included project management (68% of projects), team management (40%), and communication, ethics, and sustainability (28% each).  Common deliverables (assignments) were drawings, presentations, and reports (84%, 80%, and 76% of projects, respectively), and cost estimates and proposals (60% each).  The number of teams per project varied widely; 48% had one team but 16% had six to 10 teams.  Most projects (68%) had teams of six or fewer.  The multi-disciplinary nature of the projects appears to be related to the involvement of practitioners.  These two characteristics plus team-based design and nontechnical instruction indicate that the capstone projects relied on experiential learning. 

This paper describes how students’ technical communication abilities, focusing on individual abilities, are assessed in a two-semester capstone course.  Detailed scheduling and grading information is also provided. 

Creativity, invention, and innovation are values championed as central pillars of engineering education, particularly in Capstone Design courses. However, university environments that foster open-ended design-build projects are uncommon. In addition, fabrication and prototyping spaces at the university level are more like ‘machine shops’ where capstone students must contract out their actual building activities. The desire to make design and prototyping more integral to the capstone experience led to the creation of The Invention Studio, a free-to-use, 3000 ft2 maker space and culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Though initially founded specifically for the Capstone Design course, the Invention Studio has taken on a life and culture of its own, far beyond just a capstone design prototyping lab. There, 500 student users per month hang out, create things (using $1M of capital equipment), meet, and mentor each other for at least 25 courses as well as independent projects. The Invention Studio is centrally managed and maintained by an undergraduate student group with support from the university staff and courses. Herein, the underlying motivation, organization, facilities, safety, funding, and intellectual property policies are described in an effort to guide others in the creation of such an environment. The Invention Studio’s facilities, infrastructure, and cultural transformation are demonstrating the value and sustainability of hands-on, design-build education to stimulate innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship in engineering undergraduates, in capstone design courses and beyond.