Washington University Assistant Professor Mechanical Engineering/Mechanical Engineering Technology Program Department of Engineering & Design c American Society for Engineering Education, 2019 Optimizing Capstone Team FormationAbstractFor senior capstone teams, team composition is one of the primary factors in student satisfactionand project success. Previous team formation were done manually after students submitted theirtop five choices from the available projects and were time consuming and ineffective. Toimprove team composition and reduce formation time, mixed-integer linear programming isutilized to optimize the team formation process. The presented approach allows control of
Design for Homeless (DfH): A capstone experienceAbstractCapstone projects are usually designed to promote critical thinking, problem-solving, andcreativity using the knowledge and skills students acquire in their coursework. This paperpresents the initial findings of a two-semester-long, industry-facilitated, and collaborativecapstone project in Spring and Fall 2018. A team of construction management and interiordesign students at California State University, Fresno was tasked to design and build a temporaryhome prototype for a local homeless shelter to raise awareness of an urgent social and economicissue in the community. The new design aims to create a more comfortable and upliftingenvironment for the homeless. The project provides an
the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Prescott campus in northern Arizona. She earned both her M.S. and Ph.D. in so- cial psychology from Texas Christian University and has over 16 years of collegiate teaching experience. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2019 Giving Students Choice in their Capstone ExperienceAbstractMaintaining motivation over an open-ended senior design or capstone project is an ongoingchallenge. We apply self-determination theory which links intrinsic motivation to competence,relatedness, and autonomy (or choice) to motivation in the classroom. Our goal is to see howchoice or perceived choice affects the outcome of students in capstone. We deployed a
Mechatronics Stakeholder research / customer needs Software architecture Target specifications Communication protocols Concept generation and selection Power Prototyping Measurement systems Design for manufacturing Noise and groundingLike the conventional capstone course, the EMSD course revolves around a semester-longproject. The projects are student initiated and must contain sensing, actuation, and computationelements. While many students in the conventional design course opt for projects that featuresimilar components, EMSD students are required to include those features and are expected todemonstrate superior performance on the
encouraged to work on projects, papers,or other academic exercises that require extended periods of deep and sustained thought.The next section describes our capstone design course, followed by an explanation of eachreflection experience in the context of the design process. We then present a quantitative andqualitative summary of the results of these changes. Our conclusions are offered in the finalsection. Appendices contain rubrics of the reflection exercises.Capstone Design Course StructureThe authors have designed and offered a two-semester multidisciplinary engineering designcourse within the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department at WestPoint. EECS includes three ABET-accredited majors: Electrical Engineering, Computer
Paper ID #25209Student Designers’ Interactions with Users in Capstone Design Projects: AComparison Across TeamsMr. Robert P. Loweth, University of Michigan Robert P. Loweth is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. He earned a B.S. in Engineering Sciences from Yale University (2016), with a double major in East Asian Studies. He also holds a Graduate Certificate in Chinese and American Studies, jointly awarded by Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University in China. His current research focuses on how undergraduate engineering students approach front-end design
Paper ID #27601Examining the Differences in Student Motivation for Industry Projects andNon-Industry Projects in Senior Capstone DesignDevanshi Shah, Florida Institute of Technology I am a graduate student pursuing M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Florida Institute of Technology with specialization in Structures, Solid Mechanics and Materials. I graduated with B.E. in Mechanical Engineering in India in May 2016. My research is focused on Student’s Motivation in Engineering under the advisement of Dr. Beshoy Morkos.Elisabeth Kames, Florida Institute of Technology Elisabeth Kames is a graduate student working on her Ph.D. in
]. Social loafing tends to increase withteam size [3].At the Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech), aerospace engineering majors take a three-semester Capstone Design sequence- a one-credit Junior Design class in the spring, then twothree-credit Senior Design 1 and Senior Design 2 classes. Aerospace projects are complex andcostly, and teams tend to be large, averaging eight students per team. Teams are self-organizedand pick their own project managers after being assigned to a team. One instructor is responsiblefor grading the entire class (a typical class size is ~70 students), though other faculty may act astechnical advisors to individual teams. Student grading is based on team products (60%), peerfeedback (20%), and individual
. The senior designor “capstone” project course became MAE189 Senior Projects, and students were required totake 3 units of MAE189 for graduation. With only 3 “decentralized units,” the ambitions of thestudents were limited and projects were also, unsurprisingly, of low quality. Around 2005, theunit limit on MAE189 was removed; the 3 unit requirement was maintained, but up to 8additional MAE189 units could be used for technical elective credit. This was done both toplease students who were increasingly finding that project involvement was the easiest way toget an engineering job, and the projects were getting larger, needing students to be active formultiple quarters. In fact, students were starting to get involved in projects prior to their
Paper ID #25238Engineering Design Instruction Using Slack for Project Support and Team-workDr. Jonathan Elliot Gaines, University of South Florida Jonathan E. Gaines is faculty in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of South Florida. He is the Director of First Year Experiential Education and Learning. Through this position, he develops and implements the curriculum for USF’s Foundations of Engineering Lab course. He is also the Principle Investigator for Bulls Engineering Youth Experience (Bulls-EYE Mentoring) a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math based outreach program that uses undergraduate
Paper ID #26485Building a Functional Cardiograph Over Four Semesters: Part 2 – Program-ming a MicrocontrollerDr. Gail Baura, Loyola University Chicago Dr. Gail Baura is a Professor and Director of Engineering Science at Loyola University Chicago. While creating the curriculum for this new program, she embedded multi-semester projects to increase student engagement and performance. Previously, she was a Professor of Medical Devices at Keck Graduate In- stitute of Applied Life Sciences, which is one of the Claremont Colleges. She received her BS Electrical Engineering degree from Loyola Marymount University, her MS
experientially, on timelines typically longer than available for capstone experiences.As a result, students often lack the time to test or iterate on their design. Because the capstoneexperience is at the end of the undergraduate education, students taking analysis based coursesdo not connect their coursework to design, the key engineering discipline. Additionally, at someuniversities, capstone projects are department specific and projects do not build on anunderstanding of the inter-relationship of different disciplines.In this paper the authors discuss their experience and lessons learned from creating a multi-yearintegrated system design (ISD) project. The experience seeks to mediate the above concerns bybeing multi-disciplinary and engaging all
Team, a select group of teaching faculty expressly devoted to the first-year Engineering Program at NU. In addition, she serves as a Faculty Advisor for Senior Capstone Design and graduate-level Challenge Projects in Northeastern’s Gordon Engineering Leadership Program. Dr. Jaeger-Helton has been the recipient of over 15 awards in engineering education for both teaching and mentoring and has been involved in several engineering educational research initiatives through ASEE and beyond.Dr. Bridget M. Smyser, Northeastern University Dr. Smyser is an Associate Teaching Professor and the Lab Director of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. Her research interests include Capstone Design and Lab Pedagogy.Prof. Hugh L
Cornerstone Design, Senior Capstone Design,Engineering Education, Engineering Retention1. IntroductionEngineering curriculum at the university level typically culminates in a senior design capstonecourse. The goal of the senior capstone design course is to challenge the students with an exampleof a real-world project, preparing them for industry. University curriculum used to focus heavilyon design and design challenges, typical of industry level engineering. Due to increasing systemcomplexity, engineering curriculums were prompted to add more science and mathematics classesto help students understand needed tools and methods.1 However, over time this produced studentswith a decreasing understanding of the practical applications of engineering and
ratings.KeywordsCAPSTONE teams, CATME, Peer evaluation, psychological safety, conflict, cohesiveness,satisfactionIntroductionLike many disciplines, engineering programs use teams in some courses because theengineering curriculum prepares students to work on multidisciplinary teams [1]. Engineeringstudents usually take a capstone course in the last year of their studies. In capstone courses,instructors simulate real-world problems, often with assistance of external sponsors [2],match student teams with projects [2], [3], identify team leaders to increase teameffectiveness, assess teams during the projects, diagnose team dysfunctions, and help studentslearn to improve their work in teams [2]. Instructors also aim to develop the students’professional skills for
-institutional study of students’ transitions fromtheir capstone (senior) design experiences into engineering work [21-24]. The sections belowdescribe the sites, participants, data collection, and data analysis.Site DescriptionsThe research study involves four different universities: two large public comprehensiveuniversities (one in the mountain west and one in the mid-Atlantic), one small public technicaluniversity in the southeast, and one small private college in the northeast. Three have a year-longcapstone design program and one has a four-semester design sequence that spans the junior andsenior years. All focus heavily on industry-sponsored projects; three also include faculty-sponsored and national-competition projects. All emphasize
Paper ID #26931Board 38: Experiential Learning Opportunities through Collaborative ProjectsDr. Rustin G Vogt, California State University Sacramento Rustin Vogt is a professor of Mechanical Engineering at California State University, Sacramento. Pro- fessor Vogt holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Materials Science Engineering. His teaching focus is on Materials Selection in Design and Sustainability, Manufacturing, Machine Design, and the capstone senior project course. Professor Vogt was the lead faculty on for the CSU Sacramento State entry into the 2016 SMUD Tiny House Competition and played a supporting
; engineering design decisions are consequential for the design and how it performsupon implementation. To use a spoon, the person may need to like the color; and the material ofthe blade must be strong enough for an endurance task. Because design decisions areconsequential, undergraduate engineering programs have a responsibility to prepare students asdecision makers.Capstone design courses allow undergraduate engineering students to experience open-endeddesign projects before starting their professional careers. As such, capstone serves as anopportunity to develop students’ ability to make decisions in an ill-structured setting. Typically,explicit instruction related to decision making includes an introduction to rationalistic tools, suchas decision
Paper ID #25270Developing Instructional Design Agents to Support Novice and K-12 DesignEducationDr. Corey T. Schimpf, Concord Consoritum Corey Schimpf is a Learning Analytics Scientist with interest in design research, learning analytics, re- search methods and under-representation in engineering, A major strand of his work focuses on develop- ing and analyzing learning analytics that model students’ cognitive states or strategies through fine-grained computer-logged data from open-ended technology-centered science and engineering projects. His disser- tation research explored the use of Minecraft to teach early
experiential learning in engineering education. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2019 Assessing the Impact of Embedding Nursing Students in Bioengineering Senior Design Projects: Student Perceptions of Interprofessional Team Benefits and ChallengesAbstractProfessional experiences are a cornerstone of both bioengineering and nursing undergraduateprograms. Bioengineering students gain real-world experience by participating in their team-based senior-design capstone projects. Similarly, Nursing students typically completecoursework that exposes them to other professional fields as part of transitioning to professionalpractice. At the University of Pittsburgh, the
Paper ID #26738An Analysis of Factors Impacting Design Self-Efficacy of Senior Design Stu-dentsDr. Joanna Tsenn, Texas A&M University Joanna Tsenn is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University. She earned her B.S. from the University of Texas at Austin and her Ph.D. from Texas A&M University. She coordinates the mechanical engineering senior capstone design projects and teaches senior design lectures and studios. Her research interests include engineering education and engineering design methodology.Mrs. Heather S. Lewis, Texas A
systems, like Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) orEnvisionTM, are essentially rubrics for professional projects and have been used to introduce civilengineering students about sustainable design and evaluate capstone projects [4, 9]. Althoughthey are valuable learning tools, professional rating systems are often limited to a subset ofproject topics (i.e., infrastructure) and may be difficult for students to apply to their morenarrowly scoped projects.In order to address the assessment tool gap, we sought to develop a sustainable design rubric thatcould be applied to student projects across engineering disciplines and to employ a rigorousconstruct validation process for the rubric’s development. Benson opens her article on
them to an authentic and iterative engineering design activity helps studentsincrease their self-efficacy and confidence in relation to their design skills.This paper addresses the research gap in the Maker Movement literature about the impact thatthe integration of making activities into cornerstone design courses has on engineering students.The existing literature lacks studies that aim to determine specific impacts of maker education onstudents’ technical or soft skills [16]. This study follows fourth-year mechanical engineeringstudents in their capstone design course and explores the effects of different students’ learningexperiences on the outcome of their capstone design project. Students who took one or both ofthe courses discussed
sophomore and junior years.Even within capstone courses, teamwork instruction can be limited. A national survey ofcapstone design courses that included faculty beliefs and teaching practices by Pembridge andParetti showed that teamwork, as a separate topic from project management, were rarely in thetop five topics covered in the course [18]. Much attention in literature has been focused aroundhow to form teams [19-23] and using peer-evaluation to improving teamwork skills [24, 25] butthere are still many open-ended questions relating to the best way to manage and mentor teams[15].One major reason for benchmarking teaming experiences currently in the curriculum is to betterunderstand where students are exposed to teams throughout a curriculum. This
necessary.Design faculty across a range of educational institutions still feel that the leaders of engineeringcolleges (deans, department heads, tenured faculty) are unable or unwilling to recognize theintellectual complexities and resources needed to support good design education[1].Fortunately, more and more educators are becoming aware of the issues of design, and steps arebeing taken world wide, to address the concerns of industry at large. One approach has been toform “symbiotic” partnership between industry and academia through senior capstone projects.The capstone course has evolved over the years from “made up” projects devised by faculty toindustry-sponsored projects where companies provide “real” problems, along with expertise andfinancial
are resource-intensive and often a one-time intervention.The growth of academic makerspaces has provided an opportunity to infuse more hands-ondesign learning experiences throughout students’ education. These spaces also offer resources tostudents outside of engineering majors and make room for more interest driven learning thanmore formal design courses. While academic makerspaces are seen as a place for students toengage in design practice, how much explicit support do these spaces provide for designlearning? Many students use makerspaces as a means to engage in fabrication work for courses,such as senior capstone design courses, that formally teach and scaffold design for students.How do students engaging in interest driven fabrication
Foundation (NSF) funded projects: Professional Formation of Engineers: Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (PFE: RIEF) - Using Digital Badging and Design Challenge Modules to Develop Professional Identity; Professional Formation of Engineers: REvolutionizing engineering and computer science Departments (IUSE PFE\RED) - Formation of Accomplished Chemical Engineers for Transform- ing Society. She is a member of the CBE department’s ABET and Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, as well as faculty advisor for several student societies. She is the instructor of several courses in the CBE curriculum including the Material and Energy Balances, junior laboratories and Capstone Design courses. She is associated with
), 3) choosing a mentor, 4) choosing a potential employer, 5) developing critical skills listed in company job postings, 6) planning for a career fair, 7) writing a 1-3 minute career fair plea/pitch for potential employers, 8) preparing for paid internships, 9) preparing for a full time job, 10) preparing for interviews, 11) preparing for a paid project (e.g. University Undergraduate Research Initiative (UURI), Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO); see [33] summarizing 14 such projects), 12) preparing for a senior design capstone project, 13) preparing for an honor’s thesis, 14) preparing for graduate school, 15) preparing a statement of purpose, 16) preparing for graduate work (e.g. thesis), 17) preparing for
theMechanical Design Project module taught to chemical engineering students at ImperialCollege London (ICL).The MEng Chemical Engineering programme at ICL is currently undergoing a review of itscurriculum and we believe that this study and its results would be valuable to inform anddirect future module design within the programme in which many modules are team-based.This could involve and lead to the introduction of new- and the strengthening of existing peerlearning opportunities which could transform the way we teach and learn in our department.The role of academic self-efficacy, peer learning and team efficacy within PBLThe use of PBL in engineering education is widespread [7, 8, 12 - 15]. In PBL, real-lifeproblems are presented as the stimuli to
with graduate and undergraduate students) and directed large scale projects in engineering education research. He is the founding editor for the Journal of Pre- College Engineering Education, co-editor of the book ”Engineering in Pre-College Settings: Synthesizing Research, Policy, and Practices” and ”Technology Education Today: International Perspectives” and co- lead author of Hands-on Standards STEM in Action, an award winning internationally available set of learning modules for grades preK - 5th grade published by ETA hand2mind and LearningResourcesUK.Prof. Suzanne – Burgoyne, University of Missouri Suzanne Burgoyne, Ph.D., is a Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor of Theatre, and Director of MU’s Center