A Multi-spectrum Framework for Characterizing Interdisciplinary Capstone Design Experiences

Abstract

At the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) and many other engineering schools, the culminating experience prior to award of a degree is a capstone design experience. The desired outcomes for such a capstone design experience are very similar across engineering programs. Each program or discipline has freedom in how they achieve these outcomes, so long as it is a deliberate and traceable approach back to the desired outcomes. This freedom allows each discipline to tailor their capstone design experiences to those appropriate to their domains. When students are developed fully within a single discipline program that also offers their capstone, the structure promotes alignment of the student, instructor, and advisor expectations. However, as students are assigned outside of their core discipline to support other capstones, misunderstanding of how their unique skills support the capstone outcomes increases. The ability to then compare capstones beyond the top-level outcomes becomes difficult. This is the case for systems engineering (SE) majors at USAFA where they are allocated to other engineering capstones. In order to trace these distributed students’ capstones back to a common set of outcomes, a framework for understanding the full spectrum of their experiences is needed. This paper will review previous work in characterizing capstone experiences, present the method used to frame USAFA's capstones, and show a proposed a set of key characteristics and associated rubrics that will be used in future research.