Engineering Capstone Design Research Articles

Community engagement enhances undergraduate civil engineering capstone design projects

Abstract Over the past several decades numerous studies have shown the value of community engagement in global water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programs. Engaging and collaborating with communities through the design process enables wider community acceptance and ownership of WASH interventions, ensures a more functional and impactful design, and opens the door for co-benefits of these systems. Accounting for a range of dimensions within a community is critical to creating WASH designs that provide the most benefits. Undergraduate engineering curriculums focus on design, but often do not explicitly account for the social, environmental, and economic elements that affect the success, efficacy, and sustainability of a design. There is increasing emphasis on educating engineers on sustainability and systems thinking so they are equipped to solve complex, multidisciplinary problems. To understand how social, environmental, and economic elements fit into engineering design and how to create sustainable WASH interventions, undergraduate engineering students benefit from participating in WASH design projects that engage and collaborate with communities. This perspective highlights the value of community engagement with partners in Uganda in teaching water resources and environmental engineering design to undergraduate civil engineering students.

A Peristaltic Pump to Improve Bladder Emptying and Irrigation in Patients Who Use Clean Intermittent Catheterization

Background: Neurogenic bladder patients who intermittently catheterize may have systems that drain slowly and incompletely. These limitations can lead to urinary tract infections and bladder stone formation and be time consuming. We hypothesize that a catheter accessory device could improve drainage, reduce residual bladder volume, and save time. Methods: A yearlong collaboration between an undergraduate biomedical engineering student design team and client mentors from the pediatric urology department led to an evaluation of solutions to enhance emptying of bladders that require intermittent catheterization. Students performed market analysis, identified design requirements, generated design concepts, conducted usability testing, and constructed alpha and beta prototypes verified through benchtop experimentation during the yearlong project. Prototypes were verified using a phantom bladder model built from a compliant stress ball with an attached catheter and placed under an external pressure of 5 cm H 2 O. Tests were conducted to measure the diff erence between passive drainage and device-assisted drainage at various bladder volumes and catheter sizes. Eight student peers compared passive emptying, irrigating, and aspirating a phantom bladder model using the prototype or syringe to assess the usability of the device. Results: We developed a pump that interfaces with commercially available catheters. The pump housing was designed and 3D printed. Fluid can be moved bi-directionally with a battery-powered peristaltic pump and microcontroller. The pump has a built-in current sensing threshold with an automatic shutoff safety mechanism. Testing results showed that for all bladder volumes and catheter sizes, the pump emptied more completely and drained between 1.6 and 6.3 times faster when compared to passive drainage. Usability feedback showed that the pump required less time to irrigate the bladder and was preferred when compared to the manual syringe technique. Conclusions: This portable catheter pump improves phantom bladder emptying by increasing flow rate, decreasing residual volume, and making irrigation easier. Future design improvements will work to implement safety mechanisms and miniaturize the pump. This project demonstrates the feasibility of a catheter accessory device to improve patient quality of life and the ability for understudied clinical problems to be addressed through collaborations between capstone engineering design teams and physicians.

Evaluation of Student Perceived Learning Effectiveness and Motivation for a Capstone Design Web-based Virtual Reality Activity

This study reports on the second implementation of a chemical processing plant web-based VR for a fourth-year chemical engineering capstone design course. The web-based VR provides a high fidelity representation of an ampicillin processing facility. To examine the effect of the web-based VR on student motivation and perceived learning effectiveness, a broken plant scenario was developed, and the class was divided into two groups: paper based, and web-based VR. Students completed the scenario in teams, either as a paper-based activity or using the web-based VR. This was followed by completion of an individual tutorial assignment and a survey. Survey findings indicated that students in the web-based VR group had a significantly higher positive response for motivation and perceived learning effectiveness compared to students in the paper-based group. However, students in the paper group scored higher on the individual follow-up assignment. Possible factors contributing to the results are discussed.

Instilling SDG Considerations in Undergraduate Design Capstone

Engineering education in universities often focuses on theoretical problems, with limited opportunities for students to consider the societal and environmental impact of their designs. Senior engineering design capstones typically involve industry partners providing the problem and context, further restricting students' ability to explore implications. Despite being aware of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), students prioritize personal over professional implications. This study aims to incorporate SDGs into the Engineering Capstone experience by introducing them in a senior student-driven, multidisciplinary Engineering Capstone Design class. Students receive empathy training and use Canadian indicators of UN SDGs to align their designs with positive and negative indicators. They engage with users for feedback on the impact of their choices on SDGs, bridging the "blind spot" in their design work and enhancing understanding of the broader context of their designs. Incorporating empathy training and a co-design approach can improve students' understanding of the potential impact of their designs on SDGs.

Utilising forensic tools to assist in chemical engineering capstone assessment grading

The grading of assessments that consists of large calculations represents an odious task for educators, as they must verify the correct procedures and algorithms were used as well as ensure that the calculations have been done correctly. For engineering capstone design project assessments, these calculations represent spreadsheets, coding and ancillary calculations that can run to over a hundred pages. There is no meaningful way an educator can properly assess such material in the timeframe given for grading. As such, quantitative tools are needed that enable educators to rapidly evaluate calculation-based assessments. Forensic auditing tools were used here to evaluate calculation-based assessments associated with chemical engineering capstone design projects. These tools analyse how data within sets are presented, the structure of spreadsheets and tables, as well as statistical principles around numbers and their distribution within large data sets. This enables the rapid identification of features within students’ assessments that warrant further investigation to establish if the data has been manipulated or calculation errors exist. The analysis demonstrated that chemical engineering students’ reports can be analysed by forensic auditing tools. Furthermore, these tools identified student errors and misconduct, based on abnormal results highlighted by the analysis, which were not discovered during the standard grading procedure. Applying forensic auditing tools enable a rapid approach to verify engineering students reports submitted for grading. This approach will reduce the time burden on educators, enabling them to focus on ensuring the correct design equations and procedures have been applied.

Changes to stakeholder engagement approaches throughout a capstone engineering design course

Changes to stakeholder engagement approaches throughout a capstone engineering design course

Applying the significant-digit law to simplify grading of chemical engineering students design projects

ABSTRACT The grading of chemical engineering capstone design project student reports represents a considerable burden on educators, due to the detailed calculations undertaken by students. The reports represent the accumulation of calculations into material and energy balances, detailed process and mechanical designs, process control as well as economic analysis. To facilitate these calculations, most students utilise computational programs and detailed spreadsheets. Hence, the verification of the resulting mathematics behind the generated data requires significant time commitment. To simplify this verification for grading, the significant-digit law was applied here to chemical engineering student design project reports. The use of this law enables large-scale data sets to be quickly analysed to establish if the data has been manipulated or errors exist. The significant-digit law was successfully shown to apply to chemical engineering students’ design project reports, with four abnormal student reports identified that deviated from the law due to fraud/errors in their design calculations. Importantly, applying the significant-digit law enabled a rapid approach to verifying the mathematics within the design project reports. This reduces the time burden on educators, enabling them to focus on ensuring the correct design equations and procedures have been applied.

Review on Chemical Engineering Capstone Design Teaching Model to Drive Continuous Improvement and Achieving Program Outcomes

Project-based Learning (PjBL) is a well-known paradigm for engineering design education, with numerous case studies published in the literature. Capstone is intended to provide students with an opportunity to demonstrate their readiness for professional practice. Consequently, this paper suggests a teaching and learning model as a new paradigm for capstone design projects in an effort to perpetually enhance engineering education, particularly in chemical engineering design courses. Rigorously assessing students’ knowledge of the design process is essential for understanding how to best create learning environments to facilitate the development of such knowledge. Such assessment is also quite difficult and hence there is a lack of assessment tools capable of measuring the design process knowledge of every student. The model also intends to assess whether students can explain their tasks through PBL. Besides, it provides such a structure for aligning course learning outcomes, methods of teaching including teaching strategy and learning activity, and methods for assessing students’ performance. Instead of prioritizing student outcomes and mapping them to direct metrics related to curriculum, the model is also used to highlight areas of engineering education where significant opportunities exist for improving the preparedness of our students for capstone and ultimately for professional practice. This paper also addresses an early stage of a study to seek the challenges in incorporating complex engineering problems during designing a capstone design model.

The Complexities and Benefits of Community-Partnered Projects for Engineering Capstone Design Students

Community-partnered engineering projects provide a mechanism for cultivating the development of sociotechnical engineers prepared to design within diverse and complex cultural, environmental, social, and other contexts. During the 2021–2022 academic year, we guided three teams of senior undergraduate engineering students through year-long community-partnered projects for their required capstone design course, which instead typically features corporate/industry-sponsored projects. We analyzed end-of-semester reflections (both fall and spring semester) from each student using inductive thematic analysis to explore how they perceived their experiences. The themes that emerged from the student reflections, including connectivity, transdisciplinary, multiple stakeholders, sustainability, justice, and ethics, are all components of the sociotechnical engineering capabilities that we are working to develop in our students. We consider these findings encouraging, and suggestive that integrating community-partnered projects into engineering capstone design offerings is worthwhile and effective. However, our implementation was not without challenges, such as trying to force the projects to fit into a course structure and timeline developed to support corporate/industry-sponsored project teams, which was burdensome to the community-partnered project teams. In this paper, we highlight both the complexities and benefits of this approach and insights gained from student and instructor reflections.

Effectiveness of Immersive Virtual Reality for Mechanical Engineering Capstone Courses

Abstract: This paper, a continuation paper to the work presented at a previous ASEE conference as a "Pilot" planned research [1], discusses the research results of integrating virtual reality (VR) in a Mechanical Engineering Senior Capstone Course. The paper discusses the layout of the VR lab, its CAD software and hardware integration components that facilitated the immersive experience of virtual prototyping, and the effectiveness of utilizing virtual prototyping as a substitute for rapid prototyping during early stages of engineering design. The paper also provides benefits and challenges of using VR technology and recommendations for its successful implementation in a capstone engineering design class.

Undergraduate students’ beliefs about diverse approaches to making engineering design decisions: Exploring change during a capstone course

Well-structured, de-contextualized problems that can be solved using solely technical approaches remain a large component of the engineering education curriculum. As a result, students may mistakenly believe that all engineering work can be done the same way—without the use of other approaches. Capstone design courses are an established way of exposing undergraduate students to ill-structured design tasks that more realistically reflect engineering practice. Yet, little is known about the influence of their capstone design experiences on their beliefs about how engineering design decisions are made. Our study compared students’ beliefs about four diverse approaches (technical, empathic, guess-based, and experience-based) to making engineering design decisions at the start of their capstone to their beliefs held at the end of their capstone. We conducted and analyzed qualitative transcripts from one-on-one, semi-structured interviews with 17 capstone students. We found little evidence that students’ experience in capstone courses changed their beliefs about diverse approaches to making engineering design decisions. The minimal change that we did find in students’ beliefs was primarily about guess-based approaches, and that change was not uniform amongst the students who did demonstrate change. Our findings point to the resiliency of students’ beliefs about approaches to design decisions throughout an engineering capstone design experience. Therefore, we recommend instructors foster reflexivity within their classrooms to disrupt these limited, normative beliefs about the approaches needed to make engineering design decisions.

Participation in a team-based, first-year engineering design course associated with improved teaming skills during senior capstone engineering design

Participation in a team-based, first-year engineering design course associated with improved teaming skills during senior capstone engineering design

Social life-cycle assessment (S-LCA) of residential rooftop solar panels using challenge-derived framework

BackgroundSocial life-cycle assessment (S-LCA) provides a framework to evaluate the social impacts of decisions made during the design phases of a product. Rooftop solar panels are considered an environmentally friendly renewable energy technology due to their ability to generate electricity without producing greenhouse gases while generating electricity. This study presents the application of a challenge-derived S-LCA framework to assess the social impacts of rooftop solar panels in the southeast region of the United States (U.S.) during the use and end-of-life phases.MethodsThe challenge-derived S-LCA framework was developed based on a set of challenges to performing social assessments. The challenges were identified through a systematic mapping process and verified using expert feedback. Additional feedback is gathered through users from mechanical engineering capstone design students. The case study application shown in this paper aims to identify the potential social impacts at a pre-implementation stage of the rooftop solar panel in residential applications. The framework follows the ISO 14040 LCA structure, and the analysis was performed based on impact indicators (Type-I framework) and performance reference points (PRP).ResultsThe framework implements existing social impact assessment methodologies, and guides each of the assessment stages based on the type of analysis performed. The results highlight the workers as the stakeholder group with the highest social impacts. The results also highlight the need for regulation to make rooftop solar panels accessible to low-income community members.ConclusionsAn S-LCA framework to assess the social impacts of product systems and technologies is implemented to evaluate the potential social impacts of residential rooftop solar panels. The framework presented applies to product systems and technologies at a pre- or post-implementation state, and it aims to guide novice and expert users alike. Nonetheless, further research is still needed to improve the methodology presented, and additional case studies should be performed to test the applicability of the framework across a broad set of fields.

Chemical Engineering Teaching in COVID-19 Times: Successfully Adapting a Capstone Design Course to a Remote Format.

The coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic required educational institutions to adapt face-to-face to remote teaching. This study reports the experience in the first semester of 2020 for a Chemical Engineering Capstone Design Course at the University of Campinas in Brazil. In this course, senior year students develop a group project, in which they simulate a chemical plant and evaluate its technoeconomic feasibility. In 2020, the groups were proposed to design a process to replace diesel fuel from the bus fleet in Campinas city with renewable fuel DME. Because of the pandemic, several adaptations were needed: the theoretical classes became asynchronous, group meetings were online, a commercial simulator was replaced by an open access one, and the schedule was extended by 2 weeks. Despite that, the students had a great performance, comparable to face-to-face. To assess student satisfaction, a questionnaire was used. The course met the expectations of most of the students who also recommended keeping it in the remote format or merging it with face-to-face teaching. Therefore, these changes made it possible to apply new teaching dynamics and tools that could be used in the future to improve the course quality.

Updating Design Faculty Industry Experience.

Most biomedical engineering students around the country will eventually end up working for a medical device company. For this reason, biomedical engineering capstone design courses should not only provide students with a hands-on design experience, but they should also prepare students for careers in the medical device industry. These courses should be relevant and up to date to reflect current design trends, processes, and practices followed in industry.

Assessment of Two Engineering Courses in Architectural Engineering Program in UAE University Based on the Comparison of the Students Results with the Students and the Instructors Opinions

The present study examined the level of outcome satisfaction of two main engineering courses taken by students in the Architectural Engineering department (AE) by evaluating the students’ satisfaction result (SR), the attained level of the students’ opinions (SO), and the instructors’ opinions (IO). The AE program in United Arab Emirates University is one of the departments in the College of Engineering accredited by the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET which provides assurance that a College or University program meets the quality standards of the profession for which that program prepares graduates. The AE program offers a wide range of engineering courses at different levels from sophomore level to senior level. All the engineering courses are mainly prerequisites to the Capstone Engineering Design Project which builds on the outcomes of all courses to perform detailed design and cost estimates of the selected alternative solutions to a well-defined engineering problem. The two courses considered in this study are Building Electrical Circuits and Building Acoustics and Lighting. New assessment parameters which are the student course outcome satisfaction coefficient (SCOSC) and the mean absolute deviation around a central point (AMD) have been introduced in this paper. These two parameters are calculated based on the comparison of the students’ satisfaction results with both students’ opinions and insructors’ opinions, and compare the mean absolute deviations of the students’ direct results with the students’ opinions and the instructors’ opinions, respectively. Indeed, the course learning outcomes (CLOs) of the SR of some sections for both courses show higher attainment compared with the SO and IO.

INITIAL CHARACTERIZATION OF NOVICE ENGINEERING DESIGNERS' CONSIDERATION OF CONTEXTUAL FACTORS

AbstractEngineering designers are encouraged to consider relevant contextual factors throughout their design processes. However, specific practices for incorporating context into design processes are lacking in the existing literature, and curricula related to the use of context during design processes is limited. As a preliminary step toward characterizing novice engineering designers' use of contextual factors, we qualitatively coded 10 mechanical engineering capstone design reports for contextual factors; half of the projects had domestic sponsors with varying themes, and the other half of the projects had international sponsors with a global health theme. Our findings showed that teams considered technological and institutional factors most frequently; other factors were considered less frequently. Global health themed design teams considered more contextual factors than non-global health themed teams. There was considerable variability among the contextual factors considered, as well as the stages during which they were considered. These outcomes have the potential to inform the development of pedagogical tools to support the acquisition of skills related to formally addressing context during engineering design processes.

Capstone Engineering Design: Project Process and Reviews (Student Engineering Design Workbook)

Abstract Capstone Design: Project Process and Reviews (Student Engineering Design Workbook) provides a brief overview of the design process as well as templates, tools, and student design notes. Th...

Empathic approaches in engineering capstone design projects: student beliefs and reported behaviour

ABSTRACT Engineering design decisions have non-trivial implications, and empathic approaches are one way that engineers can understand and translate the perspectives of diverse stakeholders. Prior literature demonstrates that students must develop empathic skills and beliefs that these skills are important to embody empathic approaches in meaningful ways. However, we have limited understanding of the relationship between students’ beliefs about the value of empathy in engineering decision making and how they describe their reported use of empathic approaches. We collected qualitative data through interviews with ten undergraduate engineering students in capstone design. We found that our participants espoused a belief that empathic approaches are valuable in engineering design decisions. However, while students considered diverse perspectives when describing how they made design decisions, their reported behaviour during design decisions did not demonstrate translation of their empathic understanding. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations to educators and researchers.

Multirater Feedback of Leadership of Underrepresented Groups in a Civil Engineering Capstone Design Course

AbstractThis study examined self, peer, and instructor ratings of leadership behaviors in four areas: collaboration, creativity, organization/control, and competition for 98 students in one civil e...