their degree on thesuccess of their final capstone projects (specialization). Within some engineering programs, adisconnect can occur when the specialized interests of the student do not align well with therequired or offered course material. This paper identifies some areas where students had gaps intheir knowledge and experiences, as well as what they had to do to fill in those gaps. Themethods used to gather the reflections included a survey of alumni as well as expanded casestudies provided by the authors. The findings suggest that required course-tracks are lackinghands-on engineering experiences such as learning about manufacturing or the use of specializedsoftware programs. Further, some course-tracks focus on particular topics in
capstone course and provide engineering design and mathe-matic problem-solving experiences so that students are able to identify potential project topicsand create client contacts earlier in the process as well as connect additional course content di-rectly to the projects. Since the new capstone sequence was approved by both departments onlyrecently, it will be a few years before the implementation of the sequence, which allows us tocollect and analyze more qualitative data in the current capstone courses before finalizing thejoint capstone sequence. In the future, qualitative data will be collected from the joint capstonesequence to compare students’ experiences in the classroom as well as their career preparation.IntroductionA capstone course
sub-disciplines (Intradisciplinary) as well as with professionals from other fields(Interdisciplinary). One of the learning outcomes of the two-course capstone design sequence atWentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts is an intradisciplinary team designexperience.In the first course of the capstone design sequence (CIVE4000), teams of five students developand initiate the design of their original project with each project covering five different civilengineering sub-disciplines. Each student on the team is responsible for one of the technicalareas of their project. During the laboratory sessions, the students must work together with thedifferent civil engineering disciplines on their team as well as meeting with the
Young UniversityGregg M. Warnick, Brigham Young University Gregg M. Warnick is the External Relations and Intern Coordinator for the Mechanical Engineering de- partment in the Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology at BYU. He works directly with industry each year to recruit more than 30 funded Capstone projects and provides project management, team development, and coaching support to each of these project teams and faculty coaches. In ad- dition, he continues to focus on increasing international project opportunities for students and faculty. His research and teaching interests include globalization, project management, leadership, ethics, and manufacturing processes. Prior to joining BYU, Gregg worked
, faculty can encounter difficulty ensuring individualgrades reflect the quantity and value of individual work and not just the collective grade of thegroup. This paper outlines the various steps the mechanical engineering faculty took to provide amore standardized, objective, fair grading process in the capstone course. These steps includeuse of a non-numeric rubric for grading briefings, graded peer reviews, a more objective rubricfor grading written documents, and the use of course directors to standardize the grading process.Introduction The mechanical engineering curriculum at the United States Military Academy (USMA)includes a capstone design project as a culminating experience that draws on fundamentalengineering concepts students have
Technology Departments at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College since 1989. He joined the University of Cincinnati in 2008. Page 15.320.1© American Society for Engineering Education, 2010 Controlling a Power Supply via the Internet Provides a Capstone Design Experience In Topics of Applied DesignAbstractThis paper focuses on using an off-the shelf Programmable Power Supply Kit to illustrate theconcepts required in successfully completing a junior level capstone project. The capstoneProgrammable Power Supply Project is structured to support course goals and
-class assignments. All assignments weresubmitted electronically via Blackboard to instructors by the end of the class period. The in-classactivities were designed so that students applied the knowledge and professional design skills Page 25.1140.5discussed in the introductory lecture to their own capstone project. During the in-class activities,four course instructors and one teaching assistant circulated to provide immediate assistance andreal time feedback (one instructor to 10 – 15 students). The professional skills covered are listedin Table 1. A slightly different course format was used for ethics and economics, where thecourse time
of a “Rapid Design Challenge” in a Cross-Disciplinary Senior Capstone Course and Evaluation of Device Performance Abby M. Kelly, Austin Lammers, David D. Jones, Richard Stowell, Roger Hoy, Evan Curtis, Angela K. Pannier Department of Biological Systems Engineering, University of Nebraska-LincolnAbstractThe senior capstone experience within the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at theUniversity of Nebraska-Lincoln is a two-semester, two-course sequence intended to give seniorstudents realistic design experience, working with real projects, real clients, faculty consultants,and teammates to produce a deliverable that meets the client’s needs. Students
State UniversityEmma Elizabeth RoblesAddym Paul Jackson, Sam Houston State UniversityFrancis Coker, Sam Houston State University ©American Society for Engineering Education, 2025 Design of a Micro Class Airplane for SAE 2024 Competition: Fostering Engineering Self-Efficacy and Collaboration in Capstone EducationAli Dinc, Emma Robles, Addym Jackson, Joice Hill, Francis Coker, Syed Hasib Akhter Faruqui and Iftekhar Ibne Basith Engineering Technology, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TXAbstract This paper presents a multidisciplinary capstone project centered on the 2024 SAE Aero DesignMicro-Class competition, emphasizing both technical achievement and
reasoning used by five differentmembers of a mechanical engineering capstone design team as they partnered with a veterinarianto design a device for horse lung functioning assessment. Technology for veterinary medicinecan be a rich and engaging context for undergraduate design projects. Veterinary technologiesoffer an appropriate level of complexity and provide a new viewpoint on science concepts thatare part of the mechanical engineering canon [7], [8]. Moreover, because veterinarians have bothvery real technological needs and deep STEM knowledge to help mentor students, they can beideal capstone design clients.This case study looks specifically at one fourth-year undergraduate engineering team whosecapstone design client was a professor of
Education & Innovation at Texas A&M. Her education research interests are in active learning, inclusive teaching, inclusive teaching, project-based learning, and communities of practice.Hillary E. Merzdorf, Texas A&M University College of Engineering ©American Society for Engineering Education, 2024 A Student-Led Ethics Deep Dive, Discussion, and Content Generation Ethics Assignment in Computer Science & Engineering CapstoneAbstractAs senior capstone design represents the culmination of the knowledge and understanding gainedthroughout the four-year degree program, it has significant prominence in ensuring that wegraduate ethical and professional engineers. We implemented a
formation of their senior capstone teams.Introduction and backgroundThe Computer Graphics Technology department at Purdue University requires students to take atwo-course senior capstone to satisfy the Student Objectives (SO) required by the AccreditationBoard for Engineering and Technology (ABET) under the Engineering TechnologyAccreditation Commission (ETAC).During the first semester, students evaluate Requests for Proposals, respond to proposals bypitching solutions to the projects that align with their interests, negotiate terms for the executionof their project, and write the necessary contracts and charters to enter into a binding agreementwith the client.To succeed, the students must demonstrate they have “an ability to apply written, oral
mathematics undergraduates.Dr. Praveen Kolar, North Carolina State University American c Society for Engineering Education, 2021Investigating Impact of Disruption to Biological and Agricultural Engineering Senior Design Capstone Courses due to COVID-19AbstractSenior Capstone Design is a culminating course of the undergraduate engineering curriculumwhich gives students the opportunity to work in teams on designing a solution to real-worldproblems submitted and mentored by industrial and research project sponsors. In Biological andAgricultural Engineering disciplines, these projects can involve tasks such as field datacollection, laboratory experiments or fabrication of
theirstudents to seek projects for their "Design for Manufacturing" course from their co-op basedsponsors. Freckleton6 talks about design course experiences at RIT. Senior capstone courses arenot unique to only mechanical or manufacturing programs. Hodel and Baginski7, Emery andLin8, Rude9 and Bekkala, Higgins and Lekhakul10 describe their senior design courses inelectrical engineering. Wheeler and Anderson11 discuss experiences since 1985 at the Universityof Memphis in the senior design course for Civil Engineering. McDonald et al.12 discuss therelatively new concept of a multidisciplinary design team that is used at Lake Superior StateUniversity. This is an excellent approach for the senior capstone course, but one that is verydifficult to
. Bradley and Brian J. Thomas,“Student-Aimed Appropriate Technology Engineering Projects in Kenya,” Proceedingsof the 2006 ASEE Gulf-Southwest Annual Conference, Southern University and A&MCollege, TX.4. Dubinsky, Yael and Ort Hazzan, “The Role of a Project-Based Capstone Course,”ICSE'05, May 15-21, 2005, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.5. Kimble-Thom, M. A. and Brian J. Thom, “Academic and Industrial Perspectives onCapstone Course Content and the Accompanying Metrics,” 35th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers inEducation Conference, Session F4D, October 19 – 22, 2005, Indianapolis, IN.6. Bruhn, Russel and Judy Camp, “Creating Corporate World Experience in CapstoneCourses,” 34th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference,Session T2G, October 20– 23, 2004, Savannah
teaching and engineering mechanics. Before coming to academia, he was a design engineer, maintenance supervisor, and plant engineer. He is a registered professional engineer. Page 22.481.1 c American Society for Engineering Education, 2011 Development of a Small UAV with Real-time Video SurveillanceAbstractThis paper describes a capstone project whose objective was to design, build and successfullytest an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with real-time video surveillance capabilities. Thestudent team was composed of seven students within an aeronautical concentration of theirMechanical Engineering
. Participation in the Solar District Cup competition offers students unique experiencesdistinct from the typical capstone project. This paper describes the project results and discusseshow this competition opportunity enhances student learning. It documents the unique opportunityfor students to utilize the national competition as their renewable energy capstone, facilitating theexchange of ideas among educators in related fields.2. Solar District Cup and Renewable Energy Capstone Illinois State University's Sustainable and Renewable Energy program mandates senior-level capstone courses for its major students. These capstone projects are intended to providestudents with a synthesizing experience, allowing students to integrate knowledge and
separate capstone courses for eachdegree program (construction engineering, construction management, and civil engineering).During the Spring Semester of 1998, a single overall departmental capstone course was created.The intent was to provide a true “capstone” experience, where students in each degree programcould combine their skills to achieve the successful completion of a project. The primaryobjective of the capstone experience is to combine all aspects of the planning, design, andconstruction phases of a project into meaningful education experience which mimics “real-world”design and construction practices. Students are required to use all of the knowledge and skillsthat they have acquired throughout their educational experience to develop
engineering approach withalternative implementations of the capstone engineering courses by other colleges anduniversities6-13. Specifically, any capstone projects involving 3D printing and Arduinos todesign a quadcopter are investigated and summarized13-23. The paper also attempts to comparethe student’s prototype with other popular commercially available quadcopters, including somecost comparisons24.Description of the Original Master of Science in Electrical EngineeringUniversity’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineeringprogram offers an in-depth understanding of modernsystems design for emerging and evolving technologies.Students experience design projects in digital, spread-spectrum and space communications, CMOS circuitry andcomputer
Design Applications I. Principles of design of mechanical components; theories of failure; fatigue and fracture design criteria; Soderberg and Goodman diagrams; materials and their selections to engineering application; tolerance and fit, design for manufacturing and assembly. • ENTC 463 – Mechanical Design Applications II. Application of principles of design to mechanical power transmission elements such as shafts, gears, rolling chains, belts, bearings, clutches and brakes; design of power transmission systems. • ENTC 422 – Manufacturing [and Mechanical] Engineering Technology Projects. A capstone projects course utilizing a team approach to an analysis and solutions of manufacturing [and
civil engineering design projects. The projects ex- pose the civil engineering students to real world design problems. The students gain first hand experience communicating professionally, developing schedules, meeting deadlines and preparing professional qual- ity reports and presentations. Prof. Brunell is also the director of the Water Resouces graduate program. In addition to Senior Design she teaches Surveying and Water Resources. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2020AbstractCivil Engineering Capstone Design requires undergraduate students to work in teams withprofessional mentors to develop solutions to relevant real-world problems. Recent changes toboth ABET Engineering
and parallel ideas. tasks. Curriculum objectives related Select an engineering project to the Washington Accord; outcome (PO) in the corresponding standard for the e.g. environment and learning outcome (CO) requiredEvaluation based on sustainability, abstract thinking by professional coursesthe matrix of and originality in analysis to Construct the CO-PO matrixcompetency criteria Isa et al.[24
behavior at high temperatures. An apparatusand a specific methodology to measure thermal distortion have been proposed and developed bythe authors, and it is reported in this paper. The proposed apparatus, now in its secondgeneration, is simple to operate and the test specimen is a disc piece, which is already used fortransverse strength testing of chemically bonded sands. The proposed protocol allowsexamination of thermo-mechanical properties of the specific sand-binder combination. Thermaldistortion curves obtained for various sand-binder-catalyst combinations, when tested foraluminum castings, are presented.This project was carried out over several semesters, where students in the capstone designproject course sequence participated. This is a
significant. Because the capstoneexperience is the part of the curriculum that best approximates professional practice, studentoutcome (SO) attainment in that course is particularly relevant to assessing the quality of theoverall degree program. Moreover, a team design project is a natural opportunity for assessingnumerous engineering skills, especially in design and teamwork.In the Mechanical Engineering (ME) program at King’s College (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania), allseven ABET Student Outcomes are assessed in capstone design because our capstone course isintended to give students experience synthesizing the major engineering abilities for in anauthentic context. This level of assessment is manageable because the course spans two semestersand has
is no study that explores the change in leadership behaviors among engineering students asthey are transitioning from their senior year to workplaces. Even though CVF has not beenwidely used in identifying leadership behaviors in the engineering education context, throughthis study CVF offers a valuable way to compare different leadership behaviors amongengineering students as they progress into their early careers.MethodologyThe participants in this study are drawn from a larger study of capstone design courses from fourdifferent universities across the United States [25]. There were 62 participants recruited fromCapstone courses from these universities. Sequential mixed methods analysis was carried out inthe larger project. The full data
, communication and project managementskills that many say are missing from the traditional engineering education (Felder, Vest,etc). Authors like Sheppard, et. al. advocate for modifying the engineering classroom toallow ways these skills can be taught.Success in business is determined by the technical skills within the organization.However, success of a business is also based on those employees having anunderstanding of what the business really needs. Technical professionals need to be betterattuned to customer needs and stakeholders’ perspectives, in order to align technicalprogress with business strategy. Such real world understanding is missing fromtraditional engineering education. Many say that the Capstone Design experience issupposed to be where
within multidisciplinary versus single-disciplinary teams for substantive engineeringdesign projects. There has been much emphasis placed on the benefits of multidisplinaryinstruction and teaming [3-5] with little evidence to support such claims, in part becauseopportunities to directly compare multidisciplinary versus single-disciplinary teamingexperiences are relatively rare. The capstone engineering course, Senior Design, historically has been a 6-credit, onesemester course in fall semester for senior mechanical engineering undergraduates at a mid-sized, research-intensive university [1,2]. For the past three decades, Senior Design has involvedteams of 4-5 students working on one of 15-25 projects sponsored by local industry
, design, and detailing. Where applicable, thestandard references other national standards such as ACI 3186 and AASHTO LRFD BridgeDesign Specifications7.Structural Capstone Class at The CitadelAll civil engineering students at The Citadel are required to take a capstone course in one of fourareas of their choice: • Structural Engineering • Environmental Engineering • Subdivisions • Transportation (Evening Students Only)All students that take the structural engineering capstone class are required to develop plans,specifications, and a concise set of calculations for a group building and an individual project oftheir choice. Given the lead author’s vast design experiences with buildings, bridges, and pierand wharf type structures
significant challenge.This paper presents an approach to capstone course design that explores how Human-CenteredDesign (HCD) mindsets and practices can be foregrounded in a heavily technology-centriclearning experience. We developed a capstone course for undergraduate STEM students thatforegrounds human-centered mindsets in a technical project focused on 3D printing prostheticdevices for a participant with a limb difference.We analyzed data collected from the course to shed light on specific challenges in foregroundinga deep human-centered perspective in technical STEM courses, and we provide guidance foreducators who also seek a similar reorientation. Our analysis consisted of a thematic coding onwritten deliverables and instructor observations from
, Madison B.S., Mechanical Engineering University of Wisconsin - Madison, Dec 2023Theodore Zheng Hong Lee, University of Wisconsin, Madison Theodore Zheng Hong Lee is a graduate in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin Madison. He is currently a Project Engineer in Alkar Rapidpak.Corinn Sievwright, University of Wisconsin, Madison ©American Society for Engineering Education, 2024 Design and Development of a Pneumatic Breadboard and “Sandbox” for Students in Mechanical Engineering Capstone DesignIntroduction Many students entering senior design have never taken a fluid power course or workedwith pneumatic circuits in any way. Most have only taken an introductory