Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Scott Aten; Derek T. Schade; Kurt J. Colella

Session 3525 SOLAR SPLASH AS A CAPSTONE DESIGN PROJECT Kurt J. Colella U. S. Coast Guard Academy Derek T. Schade USCGC FORWARD (WMEC-911) Scott Aten USCGC SPAR (WLB-403)Introduction The senior-level design project is the capstone experience for all graduating engineeringstudents. Senior design is the culmination of the design integration process, where the student’spast experiences with design are called upon to successfully complete

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

V.J. Deleveaux; C.O. Ruud

” workshop sponsored by the Penn State University, forthe National Coalition for Manufacturing Leadership, the consensus opinion of the industryparticipants seconded that two of the major skills in which engineering graduates were weak areinterpersonal and communication [NCML,1996]Consequently, the Penn State Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering (I & ME) departmenthas designed a Capstone course to address these weakness. The Capstone course began in theSpring of 1994 as a joint effort between Industrial and Aerospace Engineering to design andmanufacture a full size sail plane. By the fall of 1995 the course had expanded to 10 projects; allof which were inter-disciplinary. Examples of projects include: design and fabrication of semi-automated

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Barbara Blake Bath

Session 1265 Field Session at Colorado School of Mines A Capstone Applied Mathematics/Computer Science Course Barbara Blake Bath Colorado School of Mines Each student at the Colorado School of Mines completes “Field Session” as one of thegraduation requirements. In Chemical Engineering, the students do unit operations labs, inPetroleum Engineering, they get hands on experience in petroleum extraction, in CivilEngineering, they learn to survey, and in Mining Engineering, they actually work in the school’sexperimental mine. In the Department of Mathematical

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

John A. Marin; James E. Armstrong

model and evaluate within the limits of the course. Thus, faculty must assist studentsin selecting those key criteria that will become the focus for the development and assessment ofalternatives. Available time, student background, and applicable resources impact the selection ofthe key design criteria. Since the capstone program integrates the principles, concepts, andtechniques explored in earlier courses, we try to limit the amount of new techniques students willhave to learn to model and evaluate selected criteria. Otherwise, students invariably ask thequestion, “Why did I have to take all those other courses?” Faculty, in consultation with the students and the client, direct the focus of the project at thisstage. Using the House of

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

John E. Mayer

student, an assessment of the individual student’scontribution to the project, and the student’s individual oral presentations during the semester.EXAMPLE PROJECTS Over the past seven years at least 30 different companies have furnished projects for thesenior capstone course in the manufacturing engineering technology program at Texas A&MUniversity. Some companies have supplied multiple projects. Some past projects are listed below by project title: 1. Aircraft food tray design and manufacture 17. Gate and riser standardization 2. Aircraft skin modifications 18. Injection mold die changing 3. Analytical test device manufacture 19. Foundry ladle skimming 4. Dust/wood chip separation

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Jon E. Freckleton

Session 2563 Sources of Industrial Projects for DFMA Course Jon E. Freckleton Rochester Institute of TechnologyAbstractIt has been our experience in both the Capstone Senior Design course and the Design forManufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) course that students are far more interested in working on“real” projects. The problem is finding industrial support for about 100 projects per year. Thispaper will consider the various sources we have used. RIT works on the quarter system; DFMA isa four credit hour course; the project represents 25%-40% of the grade.BackgroundThe

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Tracy S. Tillman

Session 3230 Planning Activities and Evaluating Student Performance for Concurrent Engineering Class Projects Dr. Tracy S. Tillman, CMfgE, CEI Eastern Michigan University Introduction This paper will describe student-based planning and evaluation techniques for a 300-leveldesign for manufacturing course and a 400-level manufacturing program capstone course, inwhich students learn and apply concurrent engineering techniques in order to design andmanufacture a product

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Richard L. LeBoeuf; Gregory Spaulding

finalized and fabrication and testing take place. This project required students todevelop a sound background in mechanical design, fluid thermal system design, as well as,electronic instrumentation and control. This senior project tied much of the material fromstudents’ previous course work together, including that of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics,instrumentation and control. In this respect, the project truly represents a ‘capstone’ designproject.IntroductionFunding for senior design project courses, which have become especially common in engineeringtechnology programs, can be difficult to obtain. Finding a project that has many elements ofmechanical engineering technology and can be permitted to span an entire academic year is oftendifficult

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Robert George; Allen Soyster; John Lamancusa

effort.Acknowledgement: This project was funded by TRP Project #3018, NSF Award #DMI-9413880. Our goal: students interacting with industry sponsors as the result of senior design projects Page 2.233.1 1I. IntroductionOur university graduates approximately 240 Mechanical and 150 Industrial Engineering B.S.degrees each year. Every ME student, and approximately one-third of the IE students take a“capstone design” class in their senior year. Each department has its own class for its ownstudents. The IE class was a true

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Tom L. Powers; Roger Wright; O'Neill Burchett; Michael R. Manning; Bruce W. Farmer; Brad Gilbreath

the program is to produce business-literateengineers and engineering-literate business people.Manufacturing Projects, the capstone course of the Manufacturing Engineering & ManagementProgram, is a master's-level course listed jointly in NMSU's business and engineering colleges.The intent of the course is to help students learn how to make positive contributions tointerdisciplinary work teams and manufacturing firms. In the course, business and engineeringstudents work together on teams to develop an appreciation for the interdependence of businessand engineering decisions.In preparation for Manufacturing Projects, business students take a course that introduces themto engineering concepts and engineering students take a course that

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Jens Jorgensen; Lueny Morell de Ramírez; José L. Zayas; John Lamancusa

modified to use the Learning Factorynumber of students choosing to take new coursesnumber of faculty and staff involved in the projectjob placement statisticsnumber of industrial projects integrated into the capstone design coursenumber of "engineers in the classroom", seminars and lectures by visiting professionalsnumber of courses or modules transferred internallynumber of requests for information or course modules by other institutionsresource acquisition /donationsstudent usageprojects or process activitiesshared use within the institutiontraining activitiesnumber of industrial partnersnumber of program graduates recruited by industrial partnersnumber of courses/hours provided to partners in continuing educationnumber of hours that industrial

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Jens Jorgensen; Lueny Morell de Ramírez; José L. Zayas; John Lamancusa

Industrial Partners• number of new courses • number of industrial partners developed • number of program graduates• number of existing courses recruited by industrial modified to use the Learning partners Factory • number of courses/hours• number of students choosing provided to partners in to take new courses continuing education• number of faculty and staff • number of hours that involved in the project industrial partners participate• job placement statistics in education programs• number of industrial projects • number of students enrolled integrated into the capstone in internship programs design

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Ward J. Collis; Shih-Liang Wang; Esther A. Hughes; John Chen

Engineering(through the Manufacturing Committee’s Design Competition initiative), isappreciated. Finally, the effort and enthusiasm of all participating faculty from theCollege of Engineering made this project possible.References1. Todd, RH, SP Magleby, CD Sorensen, BR Swan, and DK Anthony “A survey of capstone engineering courses in North America,” Journal of Engineering Education, 84(2):165-174 (1995).2. Dutson, AJ, RH Todd, SP Magleby, and CD Sorensen “A review of literature on teaching engineering design through project oriented capstone courses,” Journal of Engineering Education, 86(1):17-25 (1997).3. “Briefings,” ASEE Prism, December, p. 11 (1996).4. “What emerging engineers need to know,” Mechanical Engineering, July, p. 66 (1996

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

James vanPutten; Brad Mulder; John Krupczak

introduction to thestructured design techniques. Lastly, the ability to observe how each student carried out anindividual design effort provided the instructor with valuable information for later assignment ofstudents to design teams. Second Semester Course: Capstone Engineering DesignThe second semester of the course serves as the capstone engineering design experience.Students work in teams on projects developed in cooperation with industry. A multidisciplinaryexperience was achieved by grouping the students with industrial participants from otherengineering disciplines. In one case the project was conducted with engineering facultyrepresenting different engineering backgrounds.The projects conducted in the Spring 1997 Engineering

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Clifford R. Mirman

project where the engineer must usenumerical work and experimental methods. In the Mechanical Engineering program at Wilkes University,students of senior standing must take a capstone design laboratory course which integrates the stems ofthe program into a semester long design project incorporating a laboratory and numerical component.The ability to set-up and apply both experimental and numerical analysis to a design problem, andinterpret the results, is very important to the mechanical engineering student. The results of this projectsare presented both in written and oral form to fellow students, faculty, and industry. The combination ofanalysis techniques in the different areas of mechanical engineering give the students a completeintroduction

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Willie E. (Skip) Rochefort; William F. Reiter; Milo D. Koretsky

in PCB design and manufacturing. Each of these three courses will focus on engineering principles associated with PCB design and manufacture and the use of software tools and laboratory equipment available to reinforce Page 2.75.2 these principles.Objective 4: Develop and integrate into the curriculum a capstone laboratory project course that will provide interdisciplinary student teams with the experience of design and manufacture of a functional printed circuit board.Objective 5: Develop curricular materials (e.g.., multimedia computer models; lecture

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Patrick L. Walter

Session 2259 Rocket Payload Load Assessment and Motor Performance- An Instrumentation Challenge Patrick L. Walter, Ph.D., P. E. ASEE/Senior Design Lecturer-Texas Christian University AbstractA complete design experience encompasses many facets including: specificationinterpretation, project management, proposal writing, preliminary and final hardware design,communications, supplier/vendor relations, testing, and human interactions. All of thesefacets are contained in the Capstone design experience in TCU’s new engineering program.The first class from

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Juan Carlos Balda

engineering departments, the learning of these required skills normally takes place in asenior capstone design course. This paper focuses on the efforts by this faculty member from the Department of ElectricalEngineering (EE) at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville to develop “hands-on” laboratoryexperiments and/or perform research work while allowing some undergraduate studentsinterested in the power engineering area to gain knowledge on a power topic not offered in ourpower courses and acquire the skills to carry out a project in an independent manner. This isdone through ELEG 488V − Special Problems, a senior-elective variable-credit course, whosecatalog description states that it consists of individual study and research on a topic

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Tom Mase

., “Teaching Design Through Group Industrial Projects,” Inter. J. of Mechanical EngineeringEducation, V. 21, No. 3, 1993, p. 2978 Todd, R. H., Sorensen, C. D., and Magleby, S. P., “Designing a Senior Capstone Course to Satisfy IndustrialCustomers,” J. of Engineering Education, vol. 82 no. 2, 1993, p. 929 Shigley, J. E. and Mischke, C. R., Mechanical Engineering Design, Fifth Edition, McGraw-Hill Publishing Co.,New York, NY, 198910 Boresi, A. P., Schmidt, R. J., and Sidebottom, O. M., Advanced Mechanics of Materials, Fifth Edition, Wiley,New York, NY, 199311 Cook, R. D. and Young, W. C., Advanced Mechanics of Materials, Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, NY,198512 Ugural, A. C. and Fenster, S. K., Advanced Strength and Applied Elasticity, Third

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Douglas E. Hirt

the pump can significantly affect their design.IntroductionOne of the best ways for students to learn new material is to have them work on limited, butmeaningful, open-ended design projects. To be worthwhile, a project should incorporate severalaspects of the lecture material so that students can integrate many of these concepts in anactivity. Also, contrary to a capstone design experience, a project should be able to be completedin a week or two so that the students do not get consumed by the project and fall behind in thecourse (i.e., lecturing is still continuing while they work on their project and the lecturing may beon new material that could be unrelated to the project).Projects of this type have been used successfully in our

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Lisa A. Riedle; Jill M. Clough

Session 2326 Starting in Reverse Dr. Lisa A. Riedle, Dr. Jill M. Clough University of Wisconsin - PlattevilleReverse engineering, a group project utilized in the utilized in the University of Wisconsin -Platteville's freshman engineering courses. Three years ago the college of engineeringimplemented a freshman engineering course. There were a variety of objectives: retention,getting them involved in the college of engineering as freshmen, group projects, oral and writtencommunication skills, and design experience.The first year the course was taught

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

William W. Durgin

, therefore, more like an industrial setting than an academicone. Only two engineers and a technician were involved and only a few high school students -just enough to provide a pool of drivers - were involved. This same model was essentiallyutilized in the second year as well.In the third year, WPI sought to fully utilize its project based educational program by havingsenior engineering students design and fabricate the robot. High school participation wasexpanded to include the Massachusetts Academy of Science and Mathematics, an on-campustwo-year high school. A single faculty member provided leadership and high school facultybegan to become involved. The robot design was divided into three portions, with anundergraduate project team responsible

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

S. Gokhale; J. Aldrich

design of members including beams, columns, diaphragms, connections, etc.A secondary objective of the course is to serve as a “capstone design course”. In the past thisobjective was fulfilled through having students work in groups on a design project, one that wasusually chosen from the text book. In addition to preparing and presenting the designcalculations, the students were required to submit specifications, perform quantity takeoff anddetermine project cost. While a project like this has value in that the students learn to put to usethe skills acquired in a variety of classes, there was always the question of “practicality” of theproject. Students often questioned the “value” of such a project, complaining that “too much wasrequired

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Jon E. Freckleton

blocks with academic blocks. Students are split between ‘Aand ‘B’ groups so that in any quarter about 50% are working and 50% are in classes.To prepare students for their first work block after only two years the students must havesufficient training to be useful. This requires an intense course schedule and significantdesign content. It also means the customers, the student and the employer, get to measurethe quality of the education not at the end, but at the midpoint.Project based design education starts at the freshman year and ends with a two-quarter,team based, capstone Senior Design Project Students can learn either from bottom up ortop down study of design. In the second year graphics course we offer, they have theoption of either

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Ronald E. Yoder; D. Raj Raman

Session 1608 Relevant Design Experiences for Agricultural and Biosystems Engineers: Team Focus through Competition. D. Raj Raman, Ronald E. Yoder The University of Tennessee, Knoxville AbstractThe multitude of specializations within biosystems engineering makes traditional capstonedesign courses, which typically focus on a single topic, less relevant. In our department, our year-long capstone design experience involves machine component design. While this experience isuseful to students in all

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Fahmida R. Masoom; Abulkhair M. Masoom

equipment. Involvement of undergraduate engineering students ofdifferent levels in research projects with different levels of guidance from faculty or engineersfrom industry has been found to have positive outcomes.At the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, several initiatives have been undertaken to exposeundergraduate engineering students to engineering design. Apart from the conventional upperlevel engineering design courses and senior capstone design courses, the most recent initiativehas been the introduction of design at the freshman level in the Introduction to Engineeringcourse required for all incoming freshmen. Another undergraduate research program - PioneerUndergraduate Research Fellowship (PURF) initiated about a half dozen years ago

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Mark J. Sebern

Session 1532 Evolving an Undergraduate Software Engineering Course Mark J. Sebern Milwaukee School of EngineeringAbstractMany undergraduate software engineering courses combine team projects with discussion ofdevelopment cycle concepts. It can be difficult to connect these elements in a coherent way, especiallywhen the lecture is a broad survey and the project is sharply focused on meeting the needs of a client.This paper describes the evolution of a senior software engineering project course that incorporatesiterative development of a classroom example and an object-oriented

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Walter S. Lund; Trudy L. Schwartz; Lee D. Peterson; Lawrence E. Carlson

engineering departments and vertically integrated through all fouryears. The program combines leading-edge computer and instrumentation technology withthe knowledge and confidence that comes with hands-on, project-based learning.The cornerstone of this new program is the 34,400 sq. ft. ITL Laboratory, which opened itsdoors in January 1997. The laboratory’s curriculum-driven design accommodates a varietyof learning styles and features two first-year design studios, an active-learning arena for 70students, a computer simulation laboratory, a computer network integrating all theexperimental equipment throughout two large, open laboratory plazas, capstone designstudios, group work areas and student shops. The building itself is even an

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Joseph Herkert

per se, the Franklin Scholars Program incorporates STS concepts intwo ways. All Scholars, regardless of their engineering and CHASS majors, are required to takea core sequence consisting of three STS courses: Technology and Values (first year), EthicalDimensions of Progress (second or third year), and the Franklin Capstone (fourth or fifth year), ateam-oriented project course in technology assessment and public policy. With the exception of a Page 2.374.2member of the engineering faculty who participates in the capstone course, all of the requiredcourses are taught by members of the Division of Multidisciplinary Studies, a component ofCHASS

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Brian S. Mitchell

added and removed since the inception of the course.For example, linear regression was covered the first year, but was removed in subsequent yearssince essentially the same material is covered in Stoichiometry. Experimental design wasintroduced, including factorial analysis, but was removed in 1996 to make room for moreengineering economics and an expansion of the design project. One-hour lectures on safety andengineering ethics are also incorporated as time allows. The majority of the class, however, isdevoted to the five areas described above. Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences byMendenhall and Sincich1 is currently the textbook for this course.Descriptive statistics, probability fundamentals and probability distributions are covered