Capstone Design Course Research Articles

Developing a Project-Based Capstone Design Course for English Writing Class

Developing a Project-Based Capstone Design Course for English Writing Class

Robotics Focused Capstone Senior Design Course

This work describes the educational experiences gained teaching the Senior Design I & II courses, a senior level, two-semester sequence in the Electrical Engineering (EE) program at Georgia Southern University (GSU). In particular, the authors present their experiences in using robotics as the main area to develop the capstone senior design, with focus in interdisciplinary interactions and teamwork for the design and implementation of autonomous mobile robots. Other main purpose of the capstone design course sequence is for the students to experience working in an engineering application project researching and analyzing the sustainability, ethical and social impact issues related to their projects. The students work for two semesters as a team to design, test and build a mobile robot project for a particular application. Some of these projects have been fabricated to participate in different robotic competitions, including the IEEE sponsored hardware competition, the lawn mower competition, and the robot waiter competition.

Building a doorbell for deaf people: Motivational electronic experiment for freshmen

Renewed emphasis on (capstone or cornerstone) design courses and application of educational and learning researches are just two of the changes that Engineering Education has been through recently. Despite the many possible approaches in Inductive Learning, the fact is that students’ expectations of teaching, learning and technology have hardly changed over the years. This paper presents a lab experiment on assistive technology for deaf people to help build freshmen motivation and to address electronics concepts as early as possible in an engineering course. Learner satisfaction was evaluated by a 16-item questionnaire completed by 67 students from two distinct undergraduate programs. Learner satisfaction was assessed as a set of four dimensions: ‘Content’, ‘User Interface’, ‘Ease of Use’ and ‘Enthusiasm and Motivation’, all evaluated in a seven-level Likert Scale (ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’). Reported scores of ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ Likert-scale options are 77%, 62%, 56%, and 76%, respectively, for ‘Content’, ‘User Interface’, ‘Ease of Use’ and ‘Enthusiasm and Motivation’ dimensions. We believe that similar scores on related dimensions are good tokens of the overall consistency of the results. In summary, students seem satisfied with the doorbell lab experiment, but improvements should be made on user interface and ease of use aspects in future versions of the experiment.

DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A CROSS DISCIPLINE CAPSTONE DESIGN EXPERIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA

One of the most effective and efficient ways for an engineering program to facilitate compliance with the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) accreditation criteria is through capstone design projects and courses. Currently, the University of Manitoba Faculty of Engineering has several capstone design courses; however, each is independently focused on its own respective discipline. The resulting educational experience for students, though rigorous and challenging, is maintained within the boundaries of the students’ engineering discipline, thereby neglecting to provide the opportunity for students to work with people from multiple disciplines and across multiple fields. This style/mode of education, where students work in silos, arguably does not reflect real world engineering. Program representatives from the Faculty of Engineering agree. An interdisciplinary capstone course would provide a more rounded engineering education for students. Exposing students to other disciplines and facilitating their learning of the knowledge, skills and behaviours required to work in a multidisciplinary capacity will more effectively prepare students for the real world. Thus, to better comply with CEAB requirements and to increase the breadth and depth of students’ engineering education, an interdisciplinary capstone pilot course will be launched at the University of Manitoba.This paper explains how this multidisciplinary capstone pilot program has been developed, and touches on the early stages of its initiation and implementation.

Lessons Learned from Teaching a Pilot Multidisciplinary Entrepreneurial 4th Year Capstone Design Course

During the 2015/16 academic year, a pilot course at the University of Saskatchewan was offered to senior engineering students. The pilot course was meant to offer an entrepreneurial version of the standard 4th year capstone design course. It also created an opportunity for students to work with students from engineering disciplines other than their own. Two design groups, each consisting of four students, were formed. This paper describes the structure of the course, how the entrepreneurial content and multidisciplinary aspects were handled, and a variety of lessons that were learned that may be of value to other institutions considering similar ventures.The College’s capstone design courses had the weightings of two regular 3-credit courses, running from the start of the Fall term to the end of the Winter term. The most fundamental differences between this course and the standard 4th year capstone course were i) the students identified their own design problem, and ii) they formed multidisciplinary teams to solve their problem. Both of these differences created significant challenges in terms of organizing and running the course. Students from Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Engineering Physics were full participants in the course. Students from Mechanical Engineering were given the opportunity to participate on a one course credit basis i.e. they still had to take the standard 4th year design course in addition to the entrepreneurial version.Many lessons have been learned from the experience of developing and teaching this course. Issues that will be discussed in the paper include, but will not be limited to: integrating the different learning outcome needs of the different departments involved, managing the uncertainty of the design problems undertaken, integrating entrepreneurship into the design course, talking about design to students from different disciplines, managing “sub-contractor” students in capstone projects, evaluation, scheduling of classes, multidisciplinary supervision, client interaction and evaluation of student work, peer assessment, and student group dynamics.

ARE MULTIDISCIPLINARY DESIGN CAPSTONE'S STUDENTS MORE INNOVATIVE THAN MONODISCIPLINARY ONES?

Educating Innovative minds is one of the main objectives of educational institutions. In curricula, capstone design courses provide the biggest opportunity for students to be innovative and creative. To prepare students for the multidisciplinary workplace, many institutions have initiated multidisciplinary capstones besides their departmental capstones. This paper explores innovation in multidisciplinary and mechanical engineering capstone design courses. Comparing multidisciplinary and monodisciplinary capstones with regard to the students’ innovation will inform educational institutions about the best practices to prepare an environment for innovation to flourish. In this study, we define innovation as the ability to come up with creative ideas and being able to implement them. Our quantitative study measures innovation from rubrics that was assessed by supervisors and clients during the course of the projects. We also assessed innovation based on the students’ self-report. So innovation was measured from both external (supervisors) and internal (students) perspectives. Our results show that functional diversity of multidisciplinary capstones affects students' ability to be innovative.

ONLINE LEARNING ELEMENT DESIGN – DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION EXPERIENCES

The Capstone Design Course instructional team was selected to participate in the digital learning initiative at the University of Alberta. The goals of this initiative are to increase student engagement and promote flexible, independent learning. The objectives of the instructional team were to enhance the interactions between instructors and student design teams in the face of increasing enrolment and to align the course strategically with attributes expected for graduating engineers set out by the University of Alberta and elaborated in the Canadian Engineering AccreditationBoard (CEAB) Guidelines. Existing course lecture materials were redeveloped into an asynchronous online format for individual student engagement. Related inclass team-learning activities were prepared andimplemented. This report focuses on the design of online learning elements connected to in class active learning and project applications and our experiences with them over the course of a two-year pilot project. This paper is a follow up to “The University of Alberta Chemical Engineering Capstone Design Course Goes Flipped!”

BENEFITS AND BARRIERS TO INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION FOR CAPSTONE DESIGN COURSE

In today’s world, engineering design is being conducted in a global environment. Recent research in engineering education shows that one of the competencies for engineering students is the ability to collaborate and communicate internationally. There is no better place in curricula than the 4th year design capstone to incorporate international experiences for students. University of Toronto has recently started international collaboration in capstone by partnering with universities in China, USA and Singapore. This is problem-based learning that allows students to experience collaboration with international partners. This paper explores the experiences of students in the international capstone design courses. We investigate the challenges, the risks, and the rewards associated with this international and cross cultural collaboration.

STUDENTS LEARNING TO LEARN THROUGH DESIGN

Research being conducted in an engineering capstone design course analyzes student creativity and its connection to metacognition. Data collected from questionnaires, video recordings, and interviews willattempt to show that creativity in the design process and metacognitive understanding of creative activity are important factors in successful engineering design.Motivation for this research comes from the observation that undergraduate engineering students, including those in senior years, have difficulty explaining their design processes. They often have limited understanding of their creative accomplishments as well as a limited ability to explain what makes their approach distinctive or effective.Future research will build on the methodology described here, including a more explicit framework for identifying and assessing creativity in engineering design.

Optimum Frequency of Peer Evaluations in Capstone Design Courses

Peer evaluations are commonly used in design courses for developmental and evaluative purposes. Peer ratings are however often higher than the instructor ratings and this can induce fears regarding their reliability. This study examined whether it may be possible to increase the agreement between peer and instructor ratings by increasing the frequency of the peer assessments. The premise was that peers may provide less lenient assessments if the impact of single evaluations on the final grade is reduced by increasing the number of evaluations. Increasing the number of peer evaluations in our senior design course from two to six per year did not increase the accuracy of the peer ratings but provided other benefits such as earlier identification of dysfunctional teams, elimination of free riding and more frequent developmental feedback. Peer and instructor ratings can be normalized however to yield similar indicators of the relative performance of teammates. The frequency and timing of peer evaluations are critical to obtain meaningful results and maximize impact on team dynamics

FROM MECHANICAL ENGINEERING CAPSTONE DESIGN TO DESIGN IMPLEMENTATION

Traditionally, mechanical engineering capstone courses focused on teaching students the application of fundamental engineering theory to complex mechanical designs. Recently, there has been a transition towards experiential learning initiatives, such as prototyping, in engineering design. This paper looks at the relationship between the mechanical engineering design capstone course and a course in product design and development, which provides students with the opportunity to build prototypes of their designs, at the University of Ottawa. The importance of the traditional capstone course is considered and the implications of implementing these designs are examined. Many capstone design projects would require extensive work so that they could be implemented. A large hurdle appears to exist between analytical design and design implementation, and the term time constraints limit the complexity of designs intended for prototyping. In fact, students require many design iterations before they can build full-scale functional prototypes of their design. Therefore, we have observed that simple products work best for teaching design implementation.

Unbounded

Design courses teach a broad range of skills to prepare students for the increasingly complex and interdisciplinary situations they will face as designers. This article describes how students in a senior, capstone design course worked on a real-world project, the Communicating Pain Project, under the aegis of their university’s Center for Design in the Public Interest. The project combined case-based learning and service learning. In this article we explain how the integration of the center’s project into the classroom was accomplished, report on how it worked, and offer some thoughts on its contributions to information design pedagogy.

One Size Does Not Fit All: A ten-year follow-up study on capstone design courses. [Senior Design

Reports on the viability, success, and future of Capstone design courses.

Development of a Novel Food Waste Collection Kiosk and Waste-to-Energy Business Model

The U.S. generates more than 37 million metric tons of food waste each year, and over 95% of it is disposed of at U.S. landfills. This paper describes the development of a novel food waste collection kiosk and business model called “Greenbox” that will collect and store food waste from households and restaurants with incentives for user participation to spur food waste-to-energy production in a local community. Greenbox offers a low-cost collection point to divert food waste from landfills, reduce greenhouse gases from decomposition, and aid in generating cleaner energy. A functional prototype was successfully developed by a team of engineering students and a business model was created as part of a senior design capstone course. Each Greenbox unit has the potential to reduce 275 metric tons of food waste per year, remove 1320 kg of greenhouse gases, and create 470,000 liters of methane gas while providing a payback period of 4.2 years and a rate of return of 14.9%.

Using Concept Maps to Explore the Impacts of a Learning-Cycle-Based Sustainability Module Implemented in Two Institutional Contexts

AbstractBecause engineers are responsible for the design phase of projects where decisions impacting sustainability are most effectively made, it is important to ensure that students are equipped with the necessary conceptual knowledge to engage in sustainable design. Consequently, undergraduate engineering curricula are being reformed to address sustainability-related concepts and topics. In addition, previous work has demonstrated that beyond curricular content, innovative pedagogical approaches are also important for enhancing student learning. The goal of this work was to examine the impact of a learning-cycle-based sustainability module on students’ conceptual understanding of sustainability in two varying institutional contexts. The module was integrated into the first course in the capstone design sequence at James Madison University, where sustainability was incorporated throughout the curriculum. The module was also integrated into a capstone design course at the Georgia Institute of Technology, ...

Integration of SE Design Principles in a Capstone Design Course: Airborne Birdstrike Countermeasure

AbstractThis paper describes a Systems Engineering capstone design course at the United States Air Force Academy that evaluated aural and visual birdstrike mitigation technologies and their feasibility for integration onto aircraft. The course sought to solve a real‐world problem for an actual customer using a multidisciplinary team that followed a structured Systems Engineering approach. It is shown that an undergraduate team can produce a patent pending technology given proper motivation, resources and guidance. This project's principal requirement was to thwart birdstrikes up to 10,000 feet above ground level and below 250 knots calibrated airspeed. The chosen solution technology combined a speaker system capable of producing a sound pressure level of 135 dBA and utilized existing aircraft landing lights pulsed at a rate of 0.75 Hertz.

Co-Ops and Capstone Design: Are They Interchangeable? [Senior Design

Many engineering schools in the United States provide opportunities for their undergraduate students to gain practical, real-world experience in their chosen disciplines. Cooperative education is a structured method of combining classroom-based education with practical work experience. A cooperative education experience, commonly known as a co-op, provides academic credit (and pay) for such an experience. Discusses the benefits of these working experiences, focusing on capstone design courses.

Structure and Management of an Engineering Senior Design Course

The design of products and processes is an important area in engineering. Students in engineering schools learn fundamental principles in their courses but often lack an opportunity to apply these methods to real-world problems until their senior year. This article describes important elements that should be incorporated into a senior capstone design course. It includes a description of the general principles used in engineering design and a discussion of why students often have difficulty with application and revert to trial and error methods. The structure of a properly designed capstone course is dissected and its individual components are evaluated. Major components include assessing resources, identifying projects, establishing teams, understanding requirements, developing conceptual designs, creating detailed designs, building prototypes, testing performance, and final presentations. In addition to the course design, team management and effective mentoring are critical to success. This article includes suggested guidelines and tips for effective design team leadership, attention to detail, investment of time, and managing project scope. Furthermore, the importance of understanding business culture, displaying professionalism, and considerations of different types of senior projects is discussed. Through a well-designed course and proper mentoring, students will learn to apply their engineering skills and gain basic business knowledge that will prepare them for entry-level positions in industry.

Assessing impacts of a learning-cycle-based module on students' conceptual sustainability knowledge using concept maps and surveys

As engineers will be the designers of projects that will have lasting economic, environmental, and social impacts, it is important to ensure that students are equipped with the necessary conceptual knowledge to engage in sustainable design. Reforms in engineering education are needed to ensure that sustainability content is included in undergraduate curricula. In addition, previous work has demonstrated that beyond curricular content, innovative pedagogical approaches are also important for enhancing student learning. The goal of this work was to examine the impacts of a learning-cycle-based sustainability module on students' conceptual understanding of sustainability. The module was integrated into a senior-level, civil and environmental engineering capstone design course at a large, research-intensive university in the southeastern United States. Concept maps and student self-report surveys were used to compare learning gains for students in the modified design course (intervention cohort) to those in the traditional design course (control cohort). Concept map results indicated that improvements in knowledge depth, breadth, and interconnectedness were significantly greater for the intervention, as compared to the control cohort. Furthermore, while both cohorts initially over-emphasized the environmental dimension of sustainability, only those students in the intervention cohort demonstrated a more balanced understanding of sustainability at the end of the course. Survey results did not show the significant learning gains seen in concept maps, but it is expected that students' survey responses were biased by their negative perceptions of the module itself at the end of the semester. Future module implementations, which can be adapted for a variety of engineering and even non-engineering disciplines, should ensure more complete integration into the target course to improve student perceptions of the learning experience. Overall, this study provides theoretically-grounded, empirically-tested learning materials and assessment methods than can be adapted in other engineering courses.

Faculty Intellectual Property in Capstone Design Projects [Senior Design

Reports on the Capstone Design challenge, focusing on design challenges for the participants. By focusing on the design process and allowing students to gain hands-on experience in design, they help prepare students for careers in engineering. In many capstone design courses, students design a product or device to solve a problem and build and test a prototype to verify and validate the design. Student teams are often advised by some combination of industry sponsors, clinical advisors, and/or faculty advisors. Faculty advisors serve as technical advisors to the teams and provide guidance to keep them on track. They are not members of the team, and should not significantly contribute to the team’s final design. Capstone design projects are about student design, not faculty design; therefore, faculty should not become inventors along with the students on the team. Capstone project teams are not like research teams led by faculty working with graduate students, where the team works together to solve a problem and generate solutions that might become commercialized. They are meant to be teams consisting of undergraduate students who develop their own solutions to a problem.