Teaching process design in a multidisciplinary capstone design course

Abstract

AbstractTo increase the percentage of our graduates trained in a multidisciplinary setting, we have pooled resources from several departmental capstone design courses to create a common multidisciplinary course with a novel structure. The new course consists of multiple sections, one for each of the project types previously offered in the departmental courses. The new teaching platform has increased the choice of capstone design projects available to students and provides the flexibility to form multidisciplinary as well as mono‐disciplinary teams of students depending on the needs of the projects. In the process design section of the course, teams of four or five students work on design projects sponsored by industry and are co‐mentored by a practicing engineer and a faculty member. Seven evenly spaced milestones are used to pace students, guide mentors, and facilitate the progressive assembly of a high‐quality final report. Peer evaluations are also used to improve team dynamics and are combined with mentor ratings to derive individual grades from the assessment of team deliverables. The normalized peer ratings of effective team members follow a normal distribution with a mean of unity and a SD of 0.04, whereas the ratings of ineffective members fall below the distribution. Our collaborative approach for teaching process design provides a motivating educational experience to students and each of the course learning outcomes was achieved by over 95% of the students during the first two offerings of the course.