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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

Evolution of a Senior Capstone Course Through the Assessment ProcessAbstractThe civil engineering senior capstone design course at the United States Coast GuardAcademy has evolved over the past fifteen years. Historically teams of cadets worked inparallel on one design problem with a single faculty advisor. The senior design projectsnow actively involve students in a variety of real world consulting projects to help theCoast Guard and local communities meet technical challenges. Each student team workson a unique project with a faculty advisor. The departmental assessment processconfirmed the educational benefits of student exposure to real world projects with clients,budgets, and deliverables

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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

Teaching for Success; Molding Course Syllabi to Support Student Capstone Design Work.Abstract This paper details the curriculum changes made within both the aeronautical and automotive sub-disciplines of the United States Military Academy’s (USMA) Mechanical Engineering (ME) program tosupport student senior design projects. Based on instructor/advisor observations, both sub-disciplinesrealized a need to better support student design by front-loading crucial design concepts andmethodologies in their respective courses. A review of the USMA mechanical engineering curriculum isaddressed illustrating the need for these syllabi changes. The aeronautical and automotive syllabi changesimplemented and their

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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

Ryan A. Ebel; Donald S. Abbott-McCune; David Chang

mechatronics curriculum developmentefforts: an undergraduate concentration in mechatronics, Frontiers in Education, 2005. FIE '05. Proceedings 35thAnnual Conference 19-22 Oct. 2005 Page(s):F3F - 7-8[8] V. Genis, W. Rosen, R. Chiou, W. Danley, J. Milbrandt, G. Marekova, S. Racz,T. Kitchener, and B. LaVay, Laboratory- and Project-Based Courses in the Engineering Technology Curriculum,Philadelphia, PA Fall proceeding of ASEE Mid Hudson Section 2007[9] Murray, W.R.; Garbini, J.L.; Mechatronics capstone design projects at the University of Washington, AdvancedIntelligent Mechatronics, 1999. Proceedings. 1999 IEEE/ASME International Conference on 19-23 Sept. 1999Page(s):598 - 604[10] Weiner , Tim, New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to Battle, NY Times

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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

Robin K. Burk

crafting similar project-basedlearning courses.IntroductionThe role of capstone projects is well-established in many engineering programs1. Capstone projectcourses have “evolved over the years from ‘made up’ projects devised by faculty to industry-sponsoredprojects where companies provide ‘real’ problems, along with expertise and financial support.”2 Suchprojects may be especially rich in opportunities for students to integrate a variety of curricular materialboth within their discipline and across disciplines.3In lieu of industry-sponsored projects, capstone courses at the U.S. Military Academy (USMA) are oftenexecuted on behalf of Army, Defense or other federal agency clients, thereby providing students withopportunities to integrate both their

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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

environmentalengineering course required for all Civil Engineering students. Course projects previous to 2004involved a variety of term papers on technical topics sometimes focusing on case studies.Assessment data and informal feedback seemed to indicate that students were not inspired bythese “paper studies” and that there was also a need to enhance student contact with practitionersin the field and to better prepare them for the open-ended, client driven team projects they wouldencounter in their senior capstone design experience. When the staff at the City of GrotonWastewater Treatment Plant approached the Environmental Engineering II teacher aboutdeveloping an educational brochure for the plant, service-learning was eagerly incorporated intothe course. These

Collection

2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

M.G. Guvench

-around times do not allow the graduatingclass to have a chance to test and verify their design, and get the satisfaction and the real world experience oftesting. By using MOSIS fabricated designs of previous generations, this missing link was completed.1. Introduction and BackgroundThe paper describes how MOSIS fabricated CMOS Operational Amplifiers are used as a real worlddesign experience in a senior level Analog Integrated Circuit Course in Electrical Engineering at theUniversity of Southern Maine.Design is an ABET requirement that every engineering student should experience before graduation.Although this experience can be left to the capstone project most engineering programs require,considering the diversity of electrical engineering

Collection

2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

Gregory S. Parnell; Michael J. Kwinn

thecourse, instructors would highlight the courses in the curriculum that would expand on the topics in theSEMP. In addition, the students were expected to use the SEMP as the problem solving methodology fortheir capstone senior research project, a year long engineering design course with a team of four or fivestudents. These research projects directly support the needs of a client and are supervised by a seniorfaculty member.Figure 1. Systems Engineering & Management Process [3] Figure 2. Systems Decision Process [4]The SEMP was a four phase process that begins with an understanding of the current situation and endswith the implementation of an engineering design to meet the desired end state. The phases are ProblemDefinition

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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

Matt Armstrong; Richard L. Comitz; Andrew Biaglow; Russ Lachance; Joseph Sloop

. Table 2. Quiz Results In addition to this the students were asked the following questions regarding their individualexperiences with the capstone project. These questions were answered on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1represented the most positive feedback and 5 was the least positive. These questions are listed below inTable 3 accompanied by the average response. Finally, a comparison will be made of final examinationresults from AY06-02 to AY07-2 in the chemical reaction engineering course, to see the impact this had onperformance. Question Regarding Individual Experience Ave Response1. Was this capstone project useful in terms of helping the learning process

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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

Junichi Kanai

Polytechnic Institute (RPI)is an educational laboratory that supports capstone design courses. A multidisciplinary team of seniorengineering students works on an open-ended design problem specified by an industrial partner that istypically a global company1. The course goals are to develop a solution to a problem and to demonstrateits feasibility within a 15-week semester. A project typically consists of two or more semesters.Therefore, it is essential for students to prepare well-written documentation of their results so that a newteam can extend their work. A faculty adviser and a sponsor mentor assigned to the team serve as coachesand consultants.On-line collaboration tools, also known as groupware, are widely used in many industrial organizations

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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

Roy T.R. McGrann

al., Technical Drawing, 7th Ed. (New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1980)9 Dym, op. cit., p. 11110 The percentage of the semester grade that is allocated for this project has changed in the six years the course has been offered. When the course was an elective course (2002-2004) there was an additional Project #4 that was an individual project usually tied to the capstone project that students took at the same time as this course.11 Artobolevsky, Ivan I., Mechanisms in Modern Engineering Design, Vol. II, Lever Mechanisms, Part 1, trans. Nicholas Weinstein (Moscow: Mir Publishers, 1976)12 ME 481 Syllabus, Fall 200713 Toogood, Roger, Pro/Engineer Wildfire 3.0 Mechanica Tutorial (Structure/Thermal), (SDC Publications

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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

Rashmi Jain; Keith Sheppard; Elisabeth McGrath; Bernard Gallois

engineering curriculum2. The vehicle for this thread was to bethe core design sequence at Stevens known as the Design Spine3. The first five courses are core designcourses taken by students from all intended disciplines; the last three are taken in the discipline - a juniorcourse followed by a 2-semester capstone senior year project. In most cases the core design courses arelinked to concurrent engineering science courses, thus providing context for the latter. The Design Spineis a key vehicle to develop a number of threads that build both technical and so-called “soft”competencies. The latter include communications, creative thinking, teaming, economics of engineering,problem solving, project management etc. It should be noted that the first four

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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

R. Radharamanan; Ha Van Vo

. 8[6] Barr, R. E., Schmidt, P. S., Krueger, T. J and Twu C-Y., “An Introduction to Engineering Through and Integrated Reverse Engineering and Design Graphics Project,” Journal of Engineering Education, Vol. 89 (No. 4), 2000, pp. 413-418.[7] Moor, S. S., and Drake, B. D., “Addressing Common Problems in Engineering Design Projects: A Project Management Approach”, Journal of Engineering Education, Vol. 90 (No. 3), 2001, pp. 389-395.[8] Sheppard, S. D., “Design as Cornerstone and Capstone,” Mechanical Engineering Design, November, 1999, pp. 44-47, New York, NY.[9] Swearengen, J. C., Barnes, S., Coe, S., Reinhardt, C., and Subramanian, K., “Globalization and the Undergraduate Manufacturing Curriculum

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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

John Adams; Charles Kochakian

evaluated, and steps are taken to improve the program. TheProgram Outcomes are similar to ABET Outcomes a-k, and the Program Outcomes are mappedonto the ABET a-k Outcomes to assist ABET evaluators in determining program compliance.Program Outcomes are evaluated within a matrix of assessment methodologies, including: • Course Points of Learning (POLs), discussed above. Each course POL is mapped onto the Program Outcomes • Advisory Board Evaluation of Senior Capstone Projects 4 • Pre/Post course surveys have recently been added as an assessment methodology to supplement course POLs • Senior exit surveyThe department

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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

Mir M. Atiqullah

demand for composites engineers the engineering andtechnology graduates need to be knowledgeable in the field, if not develop some level of expertise, beforethey graduate from college. Traditional materials science/engineering course can accommodate only anoverview of composites. In the absence of a dedicated composites course a special project course or aresearch project on composites could be a supplement to the standard materials course. During thesummer of 2007, two minority students were awarded scholarships from Peach State Louis StokesAlliance for Minority Participation (PSLSAMP) to do undergraduate research. These students alreadycompleted their regular engineering materials course and were assigned to the project of performing

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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

Gad J. Selig

Improvement • Electronic Commerce • Entrepreneurship & New Venture Creation • Finance & Accounting for Managers • Environmental & Energy Management • Health Care Management & Administration • Leadership, Teams and Managing Change • Information Technology Management • Global Program and Project Management • Manufacturing Management • New Product Development & Commercialization • Business Policy and Strategy – Capstone and/or • Program

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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

Roger Chapman Burk

to understand the importance of the basic logicalstructures they were taught, and they did not understand the usefulness of the modeling techniques. Theintegrative group project in the third course was often too simple to really require the systems engineeringtechniques they were taught. On the other hand, the problem had to be simple because the students didnot have the skills to tackle a complex problem. The author found in one case in which a group wasintroduced to a problem that was clearly beyond them, and then given some basic modeling techniques toaddress its basic features, their level of interest increased markedly. Meanwhile, the author was advisinga team of engineering majors working on a capstone project for NASA’s Marshall Space

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2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

David J. Palazzo; Chad C. Schools

Department of Physics has introducedPC-based video analysis as a means of enhancing both our interactive lecture curriculum and ourintroductory physics laboratory program. The impetus to implement video analysis focused on three keycapabilities; the capability to analyze physical phenomena which are more familiar to cadets, thecapability to create educational links between the classroom and the dorm room, and the capability tofacilitate a more interactive classroom.Method In the Fall of 2006, video analysis was introduced as a capstone laboratory project for the NewtonianMechanics course. Based on the feedback from this initial implementation, video analysis was used fortwo separate laboratories in the Fall 2007 Newtonian Mechanics course and

Collection

2008 ASEE Zone 1 Conference

Authors

Daniel J. McCarthy; Michael J. Kwinn

place” in the curriculum to do the assessment. Forexample, in support of assessing program outcome 5.1 “Design and conduct systems experiments,including collecting, analyzing and interpreting data, “ one of the performance criteria we defined is “Useappropriate data analysis techniques including appropriate software data analysis tools to analyze theresults of a systems experiment.” Our assessment plan dictates that our students will be assessed againstthis criterion in the completion of a design project in the Statistics for Engineers course they take as partof the curriculum. Given that data analysis is a major topic in this course and the design project requiresthe students to do this type of analysis, this seemed like the “right place” to