An Innovative Two-Year Engineering Design Capstone Experience at James Madison University

Abstract

Design is widely considered to be the central or distinguishing activity of engineering practice. To prepare students with a strong engineering design knowledge and skill base, almost all engineering programs integrate a capstone design experience during the senior undergraduate year. Typically, these capstone design experiences last either one or two semesters, and it is quite rare for the capstone design experience to exceed one academic year. ABET requires that capstone design be a culminating learning experience. Yet, there is no requirement for the students to apply the entire design process in these experiences. In order to prepare students with the knowledge and skills necessary to face the complex technological problems of engineering practice, we believe that it is imperative for students to have the opportunity to practice applying the complete design process at some point during their undergraduate engineering education and that a culminating capstone design experience provides an ideal context for this to occur. In this paper, we present the two-year capstone experience of the engineering program at James Madison University. The program, which graduated its first class in May 2012,was developed from the ground up to provide students with training that emphasizes engineering design, systems thinking, and sustainability rather than focusing on a specific engineering discipline. Our vision is to produce cross-disciplinary engineer versatilists. One important place in the curriculum where this is achieved is the team-based capstone experience, which starts in the fall semester of junior year and ends in the spring semester of senior year. Our pedagogical approach in the capstone experience is for students to take ownership of their projects and their learning. The design instructors and faculty advisor(s) support and facilitate mastery learning through directed and non-directed, group-based and independent, simple and complex, structured and unstructured, project tasks that incrementally expose and reiterate the design process. In this paper, we not only describe the conceptualization and implementation of this two-year capstone experience, but also present outcomes assessment data of student learning during this experience.