As complex challenges increasingly span multiple domains, transdisciplinary approaches are essential to foster innovation. This paper examines how students develop expertise through cross-domain collaboration across design, technology, and business within the Garage Experience (GX), a senior capstone at the University of Southern California’s Iovine and Young Academy (IYA), structured through a ChallengeBased Reflective Learning (CBRL) framework. Using a qualitative case study of two contrasting teams, we analyze how students identify, negotiate, and respond to expertise gaps over time. Findings show that in transdisciplinary capstone setting, expertise is developed relationally, with teams following two pathways: coordinated, role-based expertise with incremental expansion of identified domains of knowledge, and fluid redistribution of expertise with broader cross-domain learning. These findings suggest that transdisciplinary training supports expertise development by enabling students to recognize and respond to knowledge gaps across domains. They highlight the importance of designing capstone environments that support collaboration across evolving, cross-domain knowledge. 

The rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies poses serious challenges to engineering education, as these technologies open avenues for unethical use in learning and teaching. Even though AI poses significant challenges in education, it can become a valuable tool that enhances the teaching and learning process, especially in Capstone design. This paper discusses the integration of AI technologies in the Capstone model of the Department of Engineering and Physics at Southern Arkansas University (SAU) to provide enhanced design experience to its students. 

Undergraduate engineering capstone projects are an important workforce development tool that help institutions meet key ABET Student Outcomes that may be difficult to address in core engineering courses, particularly Outcome 2, which emphasizes societal and contextual factors such as health, safety, and environmental impacts. These outcomes can be strengthened when students build functioning prototypes of their designs. The WERC Environmental Design Contest demonstrates how capstone programs can deepen students’ understanding of these factors by pairing benchscale system development with a formal safety review.  The contest mirrors the engineering Request for Proposals (RFP) process, providing students with a near-real-world design experience while reinforcing critical thinking about full-scale project safety. By applying a structured safety process to their physical models, students develop a deeper understanding of hazard identification, mitigation, and real-world operations, leading to meaningful improvements in their full-scale designs. These findings highlight the value of integrating formal safety analysis into capstone programs to better prepare students for professional engineering practice.  

Students frequently view prototyping as a final deliverable rather than as an iterative learning process. Furthermore, overconfidence in theoretical analyses, the belief that interim prototypes are a waste of time, and optimism about first-pass success can lead to prototyping procrastination. When system prototypes are completed with little time remaining for prototype refinement and system validation, the results can be disappointing. To address this issue, Texas A&M University’s mechanical engineering department has instituted a System Prototype Readiness Milestone assignment. This milestone assignment grades students on their ability to put forth a nearly functional prototype 30 days before the end of their capstone project. Such a shift emphasizes the iterative nature of design by forcing them to begin construction earlier, the importance of early testing with a functional prototype, and the need for comprehensive validation and documentation at the conclusion of an engineering project. 

A dedicated class module with a guided exercise in Information Literacy was developed for a two-semester Industrial Engineering (IE) Capstone sequence. It was used to introduce students to tools and techniques for background research in the middle of the first Capstone term. The exercise was based on a Design Information Audit developed at Purdue University and was customized to meet the unique needs of IE Capstone. The module contents and exercise evolved over five years from a simple introduction to research methods into a guided set of activities focused on each capstone team’s individual research needs. Students reported they learned a lot from the session, it was helpful to their projects’ success, and they were confident they had the knowledge they needed to complete their background research after the exercise. An assessment of the students’ success in acquiring and applying knowledge from outside the classroom made by alumni juries at the end of the second term of capstone showed a modest improvement over the period studied.    

This paper describes an ongoing collaboration between Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA, USA, and Musizi University in Kampala, Uganda. Novel aspects of the collaboration, from an undergraduate capstone perspective, include the long-standing international collaboration and the focus on student-led curriculum development. In this experience report, we reflect on the challenges and opportunities of this unique capstone structure. 

Future engineers must learn to navigate ambiguity and uncertainty in real world engineering work, and the capstone course is a prime course to learn these skills. This research explores how ambiguity and uncertainty appear in capstone projects and what can be learned about popular instruments to measure students’ tolerance for ambiguity (TA) and tolerance for uncertainty (TU). Analysis of interviews with capstone project advisors revealed that ambiguity arises from incomplete problem or solution understanding, and uncertainty arises from missing parameter thresholds needed for defining and assessing design choices. Further, sources of student perceived ambiguity and uncertainty were identified, and design process tasks were mapped to reduction of ambiguity and uncertainty. Analysis of TA measures showed low reliability for the most frequently used TA scale, promise for MSTAT-II, and a moderate correlation between TA and TU. 

Each year the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology solicits projects from our local, regional, and global communities for our senior capstone design course.  We seek community partners who would benefit from the communication and design skills that our civil engineering students bring to help understand community needs, develop design options and feasibility, and produce a design solution.  Students are placed in teams of three to four people, and each team works on a different project directly with a community client.  To get a thorough understanding of the project site, student teams are expected to visit the site and meet directly with the client, who is a representative of the community organization sponsoring the project. The ability for students to visit the project site and meet with the client or community representative provides a place-based experience that provides students with a deeper understanding of the community needs related to their design project.  Once the design is complete, student teams are required to present their work in a public forum, which could include a town hall meeting, a city planning meeting, or an organization’s board meeting. Through place-based experiences and stakeholder engagement during the design process, students gain a more holistic understanding of potential benefits and impacts their design has on the community. 

This paper reports preliminary results from an ongoing mixed-methods investigation of Oregon State University’s Engineering Senior Capstone Design courses. This study seeks to identify best practices for fully remote capstone courses by interviewing teams in an in-person capstone who conducted most sponsor and intra-team collaboration remotely. Ten student and four industry-sponsor interviews have been analyzed; this is an ongoing study with interviews continuing in the coming years. Guided by insights from the systematic review of virtual capstone pedagogy reported in our ASEE 2025 paper, we translate these themes into provisional guidelines for instructors and sponsors. This paper extends the current state‑of‑research review by integrating preliminary survey data and pursues three research questions: (1) What benefits and challenges did students and sponsors encounter in the pilot’s online setting, (2) Which collaboration practices and digital tools most effectively sustained project momentum and engagement, and (3) How did project modality influence the cohort’s ability to demonstrate ABET design outcomes? Results converge on four findings: (1) a weekly meeting plus a single backchannel kept communication timely and courteous; (2) sponsors’ unfamiliarity with academic artifacts generated avoidable friction; (3) team cohesion improved in the build phase, yet compressed timelines caused uneven workload and rising stress; and (4) despite tensions, students valued schedule flexibility and sponsors valued access to diverse talent, deeming the remote format professionally viable when expectations were explicit. 

Onboarding instructors into an established engineering capstone program can be challenging. Capstone courses are distinctly different from other engineering courses in their broad content, the application of prior courses, the interactions with entities external to the course and/or university, and the critical importance of student team dynamics. The onboarding process is greatly simplified when new instructors join an existing capstone program and are provided with a course template. However, challenges remain. This paper describes the onboarding process in the Multidisciplinary Capstone Program (MCP) at Oregon State University. The effectiveness of the process is discussed through the results of an informal survey of four recently new instructors. Results show challenges in time management, team formation and dynamics, interactions with external entities, understanding the instructor’s role, variation in course deliverables, and course content. Also, instructor responses support the claim that teaching capstone is distinctly different from teaching other engineering courses. However, all agreed that joining an established course was a significant advantage and that the onboarding process was successful. The onboarding process presented here provides a framework for onboarding instructors into an established Capstone Program. 

The Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering programs at California State University Chico conclude with a common two-semester course sequence in capstone design. Projects are sponsored by industrial partners and all work is accomplished in teams. The first semester focuses on design while the second is dedicated to building and testing a working prototype. The department also has a new ATMAE accredited program in Advanced Manufacturing and Applied Robotics which is graduating about 12 students per year and is growing. Students in that program take the same capstone class as the engineering students and are assigned to project teams based on the manufacturing content of the particular project. This year’s capstone class is made up of 35 mechanical engineering majors, 17 mechatronic engineering majors, and 8 majors in advanced manufacturing and applied robotics. There are 14 projects in the class and 8 of the 14 projects have a single manufacturing student on the team. All students were surveyed twice about the presence of manufacturing students on capstone design teams, once at end of the design phase and again at the end of the build phase. The survey gathered opinion data from engineering and manufacturing students about the value, contribution, and differing perspectives of manufacturing students on engineering capstone design teams. The survey results paint a generally positive picture with broad agreement that manufacturing students are a valuable asset in both the design and build phases. Interestingly, the second survey showed somewhat less enthusiasm than the first. 

Since 2005, our international collaborative efforts have included partnerships with Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana and various non-technical clients across Africa, Asia, and Central America. In 2019, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at RoseHulman Institute of Technology (RHIT) sought to establish an international partnership with ABP Consult, a private consulting firm in Ghana. Based on a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) established with ABP Consult in 2019, we launched our first collaboration during the 2019-2020 academic year. Since then, the CEE Department has partnered with ABP Consult on five humanitarian service-learning projects located in underdeveloped Ghanaian communities. These projects were selected as opportunities to help upgrade existing infrastructure in these areas. To strengthen the partnership, a senior member of ABP Consult visited RHIT in 2019 to meet with key administrators and members of the CEE Department and to explore additional avenues for collaboration. This paper describes the types of service-learning projects completed by our student teams, the benefits of partnering with an international civil engineering firm, and the lessons learned throughout the collaboration. It also outlines the assessment strategy developed to ensure that future partnerships remain sustainable and mutually beneficial for all stakeholders. 

Standard entrepreneurially focused capstone design courses rarely result in students being self-employed fulltime in a startup company formed around their project post-graduation. To address this, we have developed, implemented, and measured the impact of an ABET Innovation Award recipient course: CREATE-X Capstone Design. For an entrepreneurial cohort of teams each semester, the course provides extensive resources, requires real, quantitative customer discovery and validation of a business thesis, and provides substantial and specific rewards and follow-on opportunities. We report on the structure and impact of the first five weeks, or one-third, of this one-semester course, in which students learn and perform open-ended customer discovery. Through a series of lectures, exercises, interviews with customers, mentor meetings, presentations and reports, the students iteratively and systematically converge on a business thesis. Student teams design and build working prototypes in the remaining weeks. Since launching the course in Fall 2018, 1465 students have enrolled from five majors amongst 264 teams. Twenty-six percent of these teams (68/264) work full-time for their startup companies after the end of the semester; they are collectively valued at over $250M in 2025. At least 5/68 companies from the course, or 7%, have raised more than $1M. These financial results make CREATE-X Capstone Design among the most value-creating courses offered at any university in the world.  

This paper describes the development of a Large Language Model (LLM) tool to assist design teams and instructors in understanding and visualizing their design process. Through weekly progress reports, students identified the design processes they engaged in. By mapping which design processes the teams engage in as the project advances, a visual representation of the overall design process can be created—notably, a design signature. However, the accuracy of the design signature depends solely on the knowledge and understanding of the design team. With this limit in place, we created an LLM tool with three fundamental goals: create a design signature based on a teams’ self-reported design processes, analyze evidence provided by the team in terms of activities related to the reported design processes, and, finally, evaluate the teams’ processes. Through the use of this tool, a clearer understanding of the teams’ knowledge of the design taxonomy can be established, allowing for better feedback and assistance in the design framework.

Engineering capstone programs play a critical role in preparing students for professional practice by integrating technical knowledge with teamwork, communication, and project management skills. Prior work at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs has demonstrated the educational value of both multidisciplinary capstone teams and international collaboration through sustained partnerships with Linköping University in Sweden. This paper builds on those efforts by extending international collaboration opportunities beyond a single institution through the integration of the University of Colorado Denver Senior Design program. While the University of Colorado, Denver, operates a capstone program with similar objectives, it had not previously participated in international collaborative projects. In the 2024–25 academic year, the University of Colorado, Denver was invited to join the existing University of Colorado Colorado Springs–Linkoping Uuniversity collaboration with the goal of forming tri-institutional student teams. Enrollment constraints in this initial offering resulted instead in two binational teams: one composed of Colorado Springs and Linkoping students and one composed of Denver and Linkoping students. This paper describes the structure and outcomes of these inaugural collaborations, examines lessons learned related to curricular alignment, assessment, and program objectives across institutions, and discusses adjustments made to support student success. Finally, the paper outlines the follow-on implementation in the subsequent academic year and offers insights for other institutions seeking to scale international capstone experiences through inter-university partnerships. 

Teaming and collaboration within the academic setting have inherent challenges in preparing students for post-academic teaming and collaboration. Students are typically all from the same discipline and in the same role, which is uncommon and non-ideal for teams. Through an ongoing collaboration between the biomedical engineering and marketing departments, we have provided unique opportunities for students to learn about teamwork and collaboration.  Marketing student teams provide a Capstone-like marketing report for select ongoing engineering Capstone projects, with direct collaboration between the two student teams. The inclusion of an ongoing cross-department collaboration in the capstone experience has been an enlightening and worthwhile experience for the department and the students. We have learned a great deal and will continue to refine and improve collaboration, sharing these lessons to inform similar initiatives. 

Attendance at in-person capstone course sessions is important for learning and project success, however, attendance-taking methods are often administrative burdens for students and instructors. This paper introduces an attendance-taking method to address this problem and offer additional benefits. Before each weekly in-person course session, the instructor chooses a random subset of student teams. Partway through the course session, members of each chosen team do a project team update, verbally sharing four topics with the class for 15 seconds each: something you learned last week and its impact on your project; something you are proud of from last week or think that other teams would benefit from knowing; something you need help with and why; something you plan to do this week and why. Topics do not change, and students know their team may be randomly chosen, which provides motivation for before-class preparation. Benefits include simple and accurate attendance record-keeping, student reflection on successes and struggles which builds motivation and confidence, inter-team communication, and public speaking practice in a supportive environment. It has been improved based on observations and feedback, and can be improved further with additional investigation and experimentation. Student feedback suggests that some value it and some do not.

Capstone senior design courses in the field of Aerospace Engineering (AE) provide students with their first sustained opportunity to synthesize the technical knowledge andproblem-solvingskills they havelearnedover the course oftheir undergraduate degrees. Typically, this experience is delivered in the form of a semi complex aerospace vehicle design project. This paper highlights three years of delivery of this course in the fixed-wing aircraft section as a graduate student in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) department at North Carolina State University (NCSU). The paper details the structure of the aerospace engineering senior design course by addressing the challenge of embedding key preliminary design topics into graduate teaching lecture time, which is limited. Selected teaching emphasis is placed on configuration aerodynamics, wing design, and methods of testing and validation which are not explicitly embedded in the undergraduate AE curriculum. The developed lectures provide an example of an adaptable set of material created by a graduate teaching assistant with a particular skill set. Student feedback is analyzed across multiple years in the form of statistical teaching reviews delivered by the university, demonstrating how course modifications improved both technical learning outcomes and student confidence. The paper concludes with lessons learned for future graduate instructors and recommendations for sustaining GTA-led contributions in AE senior design.

Capstone programs are a central component of Computer Science and Engineering curricula, designed to assess students and provide experience in developing technical and professional competencies through realworld project work. This study examines how student interests and team formation strategies influence Capstone grade performance. Using data from a Capstone program involving 796 students, we analyze whether factors such as project preference and interest alignment affect individual and team outcomes. Prior to enrollment, students report their areas of interest, relevant experience, and rank at least five preferred projects. Teams of up to four students are then assigned primarily based on project preference, with additional consideration given to GPA, major, and completed coursework. Under this preference-first policy, most students are placed in one of their top-ranked projects. We conduct a retrospective observational analysis to determine whether assignment to a student’s first-choice project correlates with performance. The results indicate that project preference does not significantly influence final grades at either the individual or team level. These findings suggest that the project-assignment process is effective and that some flexibility in student–project matching can be introduced without adversely affecting project outcomes.