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Enhancing Electrical Engineering Technology Capstone Senior Design Course Experience Through Industry-Based Projects

Abstract

The College of Science and Technology (COST) at our university (XXX) offers degrees in Mechanical (MET), Civil (CET) and Electrical Engineering Technology (EET). All the Engineering Technology programs are ABET accredited and have been successful in achieving the TAC2000 outcomes. In particular, our Senior Design capstone course (TEET4010/ 4020) is a comprehensive three-credit, two-semester engineering design course, that all engineering majors are required to take as their capstone experience. We view this course as a very important component in the preparation of a trained EET professional. The course emphasizes both hard and soft skills and serves as an emulation of a real world engineering project. We use both, projects proposed by the faculty and projects contributed from local industry and we partner the teams of student with faculty and industry mentors. As a result of their participation in this course, students are subjected to a real world engineering project development experience for the first time. By participating in real engineering projects, students learn to deal with unplanned events such as: missed deadlines, working in team environment and dealing with difficult team members, even dealing with different industry or faculty mentors. From their participation in the course and the project students get a very valuable learning experience. In this paper, we describe the development of our industry-based projects senior design course. In the next sections we describe the role of the capstone design course in respect to ABET academic outcomes. We also present examples of the type of projects implemented and a summary and listing of future work.

Introduction

The main goal of the engineering capstone course is for the students to apply the theoretical and practical knowledge1 that they acquire in the EET program for the solution of a real engineering problem. However, although the department has offered this course for many years and students have developed successful and sometimes interesting projects, in its original format, most of the projects developed as part of the capstone course were the traditional ones that were proposed mainly by the students and they did not have any relationship to solving an actual engineering problem.

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Rios-Gutierrez, F., & Al Kalaani, Y. (2010, June), Enhancing Electrical Engineering Technology Capstone Senior Design Course Experience Through Industry Based Projects Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--15929