Publishing undergraduate engineering designs, a case study

Abstract

Many engineering schools require senior undergraduate students to complete term-long design projects. These projects are normally communicated using a major design report that is submitted for instructor evaluation, with no expectation of any additional audience for the work. This paper presents a case study in publishing undergraduate engineering designs using a short conference style paper format. The short paper has been integrated into a projectbased third year design course at the School of Engineering, University of Guelph. The course is taken by all engineering students at the same time and the design projects vary from environmental, to bioprocess and software design projects. The procedure used to help students formulate their designs as short papers is outlined. The papers are published in course proceedings that are publicly available through the University of Guelph Library’s Atrium web portal. To ensure uniform style and format, papers are prepared in LaTeX, which is also used to assemble the final proceedings. A LaTeX kit will be made available for other universities that wish to follow the same procedure.