Board 59: Work in Progress: Industry-based Team Program Reviews for Capstone Design Teams

Rachana Ashok Gupta; Greg A. Dunko

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Conference: 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Tampa, Florida
Publication Date: June 15, 2019
Start Date: June 15, 2019
End Date: June 19, 2019
Conference Session: ECE Division Poster Session
Tagged Division: Electrical and Computer
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Page Count: 15
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--32384
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/32384
Download Count: 651

Paper Authors

biography

Rachana Ashok Gupta North Carolina State University orcid.org/0000-0002-7247-3961

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Dr. Rachana A Gupta is currently a Teaching Associate professor and Associate Director of ECE Senior Design Program. She teaches and mentors several senior design students on industry-sponsored projects (On average 12 / semester) to successful completion of an end product. These projects include all aspects of System Engineering: concept design, product design and design trade-offs, prototyping and testing (circuit design, PCB, mechanical fabrication, algorithm development). These projects have included Robotics Platforms, Planning, Monitoring and Control algorithms, Sensor Interface, User Interfaces, Wireless communication, Signal Processing etc. All of this involves direction and teaching teams how to use the required tools and apply engineering skills to transform a concept into a product. She also manages interdisciplinary senior design projects in collaboration with other engineering departments such as Textiles Engineering, mechanical engineering, etc. Beyond senior design, she has also created and teaches undergraduate as well as graduate-level classes in ECE (Python and scripting, Algorithms in ECE, Practical Engineering Prototyping (PrEP). She also has designed and taught ECE Robotics summer camp since 2012.
Dr. Gupta earned her Bachelors of Engineering in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from University of Pune, India and received her MS and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University (2010). Her Ph.D. was to design computer vision algorithms for autonomous navigation for cars. She started her own engineering consulting company in 2010 worked on product development projects such as automated air suspension system for vehicles, active suspension system for heavy-duty off-road vehicles (currently DARPA funded), vision tracking system for race car tracks, etc. She joined NCState as Teaching Assistant Professor in 2012. Dr. Gupta’s current research projects focus on sensor systems and engineering design education.

Dr. Gupta likes to tinker with new technology and work on small hobby projects in her basement lab. Her other hobbies include reading, classical dancing, and traveling.

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biography

Greg A. Dunko

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Greg is the Senior Vice President of the Product and Program Management Office (PMO), where he leads strategic product planning and program business operations. Prior to joining NantHealth, he served as Global Head of Product Development at BlackBerry, leading all mobile phone hardware development. Prior to this, Greg led the Electrical and Computer Engineering senior design program at North Carolina State University – creating a new full year program with emphasis on product development and corporate sponsorship and mentoring. He has also held leadership roles at HTC and Ericsson/Sony Ericsson. Greg is an established inventor and has filed over 80 patents. He also is co-author of the eBook “A Reference Guide to the Internet of Things”. Greg holds an BS Electrical Engineering and MS Electrical Engineering from West Virginia University. His graduate research focused on Biomedical Engineering.

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Abstract

This paper presents methods, formats, schedules and grading rubrics for industry based project status review (called the Team Program Review) for engineering capstone design teams. These reviews are devised by the authors from their industry experience but are modified to particularly suit student capstone design teams in project management still keeping the industry flavor. The Reviews mainly address two challenges: (1) Teaching capstone design teams several necessary project management aspects which are needed to be regularly monitored throughout the project execution, and (2) defining a fair, accurate grading rubric to regularly and efficiently evaluate individual student’s and team's performance throughout the project. The Program Reviews are comprised of 10-12 minute presentations of specific materials on a biweekly basis. The methods and contents described in this paper help all of the student teams (irrespective of the project topic and requirements) in efficiently managing their project within the team and in reporting the true status of the project to relevant project stakeholders regularly. In addition, these reviews expose team members to “real world” business approaches that they will experience in their engineering/management career. The format and rubrics presented in the paper are comprehensive, in-line with ABET student outcomes and help instructors correctly evaluate all different aspects of the team project on a regular basis. This includes a quantitative evaluation of especially intangible aspects, which are otherwise difficult to evaluate without in-person team meetings, such as individual and team project monitoring and managing skills, effective teamwork, professionalism, and also individual technical contributions, presentation skills, etc. These program reviews have helped the authors successfully and efficiently manage and grade on average 10 to 20 projects a semester in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Senior Design program at authors' institute. These program review formats have evolved based on continuous industry sponsor feedback and is a living rubric/method/process. The paper presents the latest methods and rubrics and the preliminary results from the past 3 years of authors' program's Senior Design teams (Approximately 100 teams) showing an increase in team’s overall performance and project management skills during the project execution process. The paper also presents the results showing an increase in the number of successful projects and quality achieved due to these regular Team Program Reviews. Results from a brief feedback survey from industry sponsors and evaluators about these Team Program Review format and methods are also included.

Authors have no particular preference for the session. Authors’ main goal is to receive feedback on their work in progress.

Citation
Format

Gupta, R. A., & Dunko, G. A. (2019, June), Board 59: Work in Progress: Industry-based Team Program Reviews for Capstone Design Teams Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32384

TY - CPAPER
AB - This paper presents methods, formats, schedules and grading rubrics for industry based project status review (called the Team Program Review) for engineering capstone design teams. These reviews are devised by the authors from their industry experience but are modified to particularly suit student capstone design teams in project management still keeping the industry flavor. The Reviews mainly address two challenges: (1) Teaching capstone design teams several necessary project management aspects which are needed to be regularly monitored throughout the project execution, and (2) defining a fair, accurate grading rubric to regularly and efficiently evaluate individual student’s and team&#39;s performance throughout the project.
The Program Reviews are comprised of 10-12 minute presentations of specific materials on a biweekly basis. The methods and contents described in this paper help all of the student teams (irrespective of the project topic and requirements) in efficiently managing their project within the team and in reporting the true status of the project to relevant project stakeholders regularly. In addition, these reviews expose team members to “real world” business approaches that they will experience in their engineering/management career. The format and rubrics presented in the paper are comprehensive, in-line with ABET student outcomes and help instructors correctly evaluate all different aspects of the team project on a regular basis. This includes a quantitative evaluation of especially intangible aspects, which are otherwise difficult to evaluate without in-person team meetings, such as individual and team project monitoring and managing skills, effective teamwork, professionalism, and also individual technical contributions, presentation skills, etc. These program reviews have helped the authors successfully and efficiently manage and grade on average 10 to 20 projects a semester in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Senior Design program at authors&#39; institute.
These program review formats have evolved based on continuous industry sponsor feedback and is a living rubric/method/process. The paper presents the latest methods and rubrics and the preliminary results from the past 3 years of authors&#39; program&#39;s Senior Design teams (Approximately 100 teams) showing an increase in team’s overall performance and project management skills during the project execution process. The paper also presents the results showing an increase in the number of successful projects and quality achieved due to these regular Team Program Reviews. Results from a brief feedback survey from industry sponsors and evaluators about these Team Program Review format and methods are also included.

Authors have no particular preference for the session. Authors’ main goal is to receive feedback on their work in progress.
AU - Rachana Ashok Gupta
AU - Greg A. Dunko
CY - Tampa, Florida
DA - 2019/06/15
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Board 59: Work in Progress: Industry-based Team Program Reviews for Capstone Design Teams
UR - https://peer.asee.org/32384
DO - 10.18260/1-2--32384
ER -