Incorporating Realism into Senior Design

Abstract

The senior design course at Purdue University involves all seniors in their last semester before graduation and is titled “Civil Engineering Design Project.” It is described in the catalog as “Planning, design, and analysis of a civil project; an integrated and realistic group project involving as much as possible all major aspects of the civil engineering profession.” This high enrollment course 30 to 100 students per semester has been taught since the early 1960s and there have been many approaches to teaching it. Involvement of practitioners has varied from nearly no involvement through nearly total responsibility for the course. The author has observed the teaching of this course for 15 years and has the lead responsibility for the course in the spring semester for the past 6 years. The article is based on a paper presented at the American Society of Engineering Education Conference Drnevich 2005a in June 2005 and at the 4th Global Colloquium on Engineering Education Drnevich 2005b in September 2005. It describes the course and approaches to teaching it and will summarize observations of what worked well and what did not work well. In this article, I will use much material from the paper, but look specifically how environmental issues are being addressed. Comments from the readers of this article are most welcome. The course continually evolves as we learn how to do things better.