Senior Capstone Design Course Research Articles

Comprehensive Assessment of Capstone Senior Design Course Comprised of Students from Different Engineering Program Majors

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) is the premier organization that accredits many engineering programs in the US. Assessment by ABET that Student Outcomes are achieved is a central part of its decision to accredit any program. The programs in engineering at Western Illinois University (WIU) place significant emphasis in the Capstone Senior Design course as part of the overall plans to seek accreditation. For example, it is the only course wherein all eleven student outcomes identified by ABET are formally assessed, thereby making it a comprehensive assessment. But assessment is challenging because there are many more variables than normal in a Capstone Senior Design course compared to traditional courses. This paper discusses the framework of assessment plans, schedules, rubrics, implementation, data collection, analysis, and continuous improvements in detail under this challenging environment in the Senior Design course at WIU.

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.

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%.

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.

The Six Minds of a Whole New Engineer

Guest Editorial Early engineers of the 19th century were rock stars of their times, much like famous dot-com entrepreneurs of our times. Petroleum engineering got its start after this early “generalist” phase of the profession when the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers (AIME) formed a standing committee on oil and gas in 1913. The first petroleum engineering degree followed suit at the University of Pittsburgh in 1915, and today SPE represents more than 140,000 professional and student members around the globe. From that early formative period of petroleum engineering, technical specialization increased and continued into the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, but more recently, engineering has faced pressures to change. Mark Somerville, a professor of electrical engineering and physics at Olin College, and I have written about this in our book, A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education. In particular, we spell out the six minds that all of today’s engineers need to embody to reach their full potential. They are the Analytical mind Design mind Linguistic mind People mind Body mind Mindful mind Analytical Mind Most engineers will have no trouble identifying with what we call the analytical mind. They know (and have survived) the drill of “applying” mathematics and science, so let’s move to the others. Design Mind When we talk about design mind, we are probably still within most engineers’ comfort zone. However, maximizing our design capabilities has had some ups and downs over the years. A report called the Grinter Report in 1955 ultimately led to (a) raising the math/science content of the engineering curriculum, and (b) reducing the design and practical content. Meetings in the 1960s helped redress some of the perceived harm of the Grinter changes by establishing capstone senior design courses at a number of schools, and increasing design content has been an important trend ever since. Today, these design education efforts are going further. Companies such as IDEO integrate industrial design, engineering design, and applied anthropology so that design thinking connects human usage and conceptual design directly. A required second-year class called User-Oriented Design at Olin College has students working in teams with groups of individuals (firemen, soup kitchen operators, flight instructors, bicycle messengers, to name a few) over the course of the semester. The goal of the course is to create a conceptual design of technology that will improve the work lives of the group studied.

Developing Future Engineers: Case Study on the Incorporation of Sustainable Design in an Undergraduate Civil Engineering Curriculum

AbstractTo better prepare students to tackle the challenges of real-world problems, the authors developed a strategic approach to incorporate sustainable-design principles in the undergraduate curriculum to set a foundation of sustainability on which students could build throughout their academic careers. The plan through the four-year undergraduate curriculum involves creating an awareness of sustainable design in a required freshman introduction-to-design course and describing the science of sustainability and how students can apply sustainability principles in a new required sophomore-level course. The students are then prepared to consider sustainability in their civil engineering technical design courses during the third-year curriculum. In their fourth year, students apply sustainability principles in developing and evaluating design solutions during their senior capstone design course. Assessment of student learning showed improvement in students’ abilities to comprehend principles of sustainable d...

User Requirement Analysis for an Online Collaboration Tool for Senior Industrial Engineering Design Course

AbstractMany undergraduate industrial engineering programs offer a capstone senior design course that gives students an opportunity to apply the knowledge gained through their coursework to real‐world projects. In this article, we present the results of a user requirements analysis of online collaboration tools containing Web 2.0 features for teaching such courses. A structured focus group analysis was conducted in which subjects evaluated several Web 2.0 features implemented using HUBzero in a prototype online collaboration tool. Our subjects included undergraduate students, faculty members, teaching assistants, and company representatives who had recently participated in an industrial engineering senior design course. On the basis of the responses of the 40 subjects, we identified desirable features for online collaboration tools to be used when teaching capstone senior design courses. A follow‐up supplementary survey of 108 students currently enrolled in an industrial engineering senior design course offered at Purdue University revealed results consistent with the findings of the focus group study. Features found to be particularly important components of such a collaboration tool included file sharing, the ability to form user groups, provision of online comments and feedback, easy organization of content, and communication methods for remote collaboration. The usability of the tool was also rated as being very important.

An Effective Approach to Integrated Learning in Capstone Design

The H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Tech has developed an integrated approach to its capstone Senior Design course in which students form teams and identify, scope, and execute projects for real-world clients. Historically, the course has focused mainly on the engineering challenges of industry projects, but the skill set required of new industrial engineering and operations research practitioners is much broader. The new course structure creatively integrates internal and external resources for teaching business skills, soft skills, professionalism, and legal issues in an interdisciplinary, on-demand team-teaching format. Assessments show that student preparation has increased, especially in nontechnical areas. In addition, project quality has dramatically improved and is much more consistent. Both an external review board and the most recent ABET review cited the new Senior Design course as one of ISyE's strengths.

Capstone Design Courses, Part II: Preparing Biomedical Engineers for the Real World

The biomedical engineering senior capstone design course is probably the most important course taken by undergraduate biomedical engineering students. It provides them with the opportunity to apply wh

Maintaining a Relevant, Up-­to-­Date Capstone Design Course [Senior Design

Senior capstone design courses can be extremely helpful in preparing biomedical engineering students for careers in engineering and other fields. They allow students to develop communication, teamwork, and other transferable technical and nontechnical skills. They can also make students aware of the (1) legal, regulatory, economic, environmental, and social/political constraints of medical device design, (2) contemporary issues related to biomedical engineering and health care, and (3) the latest trends and tools in new product development and project management.

Service-Learning in Engineering Education and Heritage Preservation

Many communities and nonprofit organizations in the United States grapple with the reuse of publicly owned buildings and infrastructure from the 19th and early 20th centuries that have become landmarks in their communities. Often these communities or organizations do not have adequate resources (technical expertise, funding) for even preliminary engineering services. Engineering programs at universities can assist these communities by providing engineering expertise through service-learning (SL) projects, at the same time providing engineering students exposure to the field of heritage preservation and to important preservation engineering issues. This article presents SL case studies at the University of Vermont (UVM) as examples of this type of collaboration. Benefits, challenges, and SL assessment results are included. For the past 4 years, as part of a National Science Foundation Department Level Reform (NSF DLR) grant, civil and environmental engineering students at UVM have worked on multiple SL projects with local communities throughout their 4-year program. In many cases, these SL projects have involved historic structures. Although not an original emphasis of the DLR grant, heritage preservation is becoming a component of the UVM reform efforts, such that in 2010 this topic began to be formally included in both the first-year introductory engineering course and senior capstone design course. The SL approach was found to be effective in meeting education goals of the civil and environmental engineering programs and their accreditation requirements as well as providing meaningful service to the local communities caring for historic structures and sites. Both students and faculty gained exposure to and understanding of preservation engineering topics, as well as networking with the heritage preservation community in Vermont and elsewhere. Incorporating heritage preservation issues into engineering programs through SL projects may prove beneficial at other institutions.

Summary of Developments in the Civil Engineering Capstone Course at Purdue University

The civil engineering capstone senior design course at Purdue University involves all seniors in their last semester before graduation and is titled “Civil Engineering Design Project.” The course catalog describes it 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 (30–120 students per semester) has been team taught since the early 1960s and many approaches to teaching it have been utilized. Since 2001, the version of the course discussed in this paper has been taught in the spring semester with the student teams responding to a request for proposals (RFP) for local projects following the design-build method of project delivery. The proposals are submitted in two phases: (1) conceptual designs and alternatives analyses; and (2) design-build project proposal with approximately 30% complete design, total construction cost, and scheduling. The desig...

ABET Assessment of a Mechanical Engineering Program through Senior Capstone Design Courses at University of the Pacific

ABET Assessment of a Mechanical Engineering Program through Senior Capstone Design Courses at University of the Pacific

Engaging undergraduates to solve global health challenges: a new approach based on bioengineering design.

Recent reports have highlighted the need for educational programs to prepare students for careers developing and disseminating new interventions that improve global public health. Because of its multi-disciplinary, design-centered nature, the field of Biomedical Engineering can play an important role in meeting this challenge. This article describes a new program at Rice University to give undergraduate students from all disciplines a broad background in bioengineering and global health and provides an initial assessment of program impact. Working in partnership with health care providers in developing countries, students in the Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB) initiative learn about health challenges of the poor and put this knowledge to work immediately, using the engineering design process as a framework to formulate solutions to complex global health challenges. Beginning with a freshman design project and continuing through a capstone senior design course, the BTB curriculum uses challenges provided by partners in the developing world to teach students to integrate perspectives from multiple disciplines, and to develop leadership, communication, and teamwork skills. Exceptional students implement their designs under the guidance of clinicians through summer international internships. Since 2006, 333 students have designed more than 40 technologies and educational programs; 28 have been implemented in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, southeast Asia, and the United States. More than 18,000 people have benefited from these designs. 95% of alumni who completed an international internship reported that participation in the program changed or strengthened their career plans to include a focus on global health medicine, research, and/or policy. Empowering students to use bioengineering design to address real problems is an effective way to teach the new generation of leaders needed to solve global health challenges.

Preparing students for capstone design [Senior Design

The senior capstone design course is the culmination of the previous three years of the undergraduate curriculum. The goal of this course is to develop students' communication (oral and written), interpersonal, teamwork, analytical, design, and project management skills through a team-based design experience. Students learn about the product-development process and gain experience solving open-ended problems. Capstone design courses give students insight into what it is like to work as an engineer.

Senior design course in industrial engineering at Kuwait University

This paper presents the capstone senior design course in the Industrial Engineering Curriculum at Kuwait University (KU). A detailed description of the course, its role, its objectives, outcomes, learning practices and assessments are explained in relation to other courses in the curriculum. The administration of the course, selected organisations where the course project is carried out, problems and solution tools utilised, student accomplishments and obstacles faced are presented. Issues discussed in this paper could help to clarify current contribution of the senior design course to the Industrial Engineering education and could facilitate future improvements in Industrial Engineering curriculum in general.

Senior Design

Lecture topics can play an important role in the senior capstone design course. They allow instructors to present information needed by students to properly execute their projects and/or prepare them for their careers and can be used to supplement reading assignments or introduce new material not presented elsewhere in the course or biomedical engineering curriculum. To ensure that students are presented with the most accurate, up-to-date information, faculty or working engineers with expertise in specific knowledge areas can be asked to be guest speakers.

Organizational support for senior capstone design courses [Senior Design

Organizational support for senior capstone design courses [Senior Design

Senior design - biomedical engineering/industrial design collaboration in senior design projects

To prepare biomedical engineering and industrial design students for potential future collaborations, it would be helpful for them to understand and appreciate the contributions each can make to the project team. This can be accomplished through the senior capstone design course by forming project teams that include biomedical engineering and industrial design students. Collaboration between biomedical engineering and industrial design students on senior design project teams provides many benefits. First, students learn how to communicate with people in other functional disciplines. Second, students learn that no individual person has all the skills and knowledge needed to complete a project, and they develop an appreciation for the complementary skills each member brings to the project. Third, students learn that there is more than one way to solve a problem. This helps them develop an appreciation for different approaches to problem solving and ways of thinking. Finally, the overall quality of product design increases when biomedical engineering and industrial design students work together.

Capstone Design Courses: Producing Industry-Ready Biomedical Engineers

The biomedical engineering senior capstone design course is probably the most important course taken by undergraduate biomedical engineering students. It provides them with the opportunity to apply what they have learned in previous years; develop their communication (written, oral, and graphical), interpersonal (teamwork, conflict management, and negotiation), project management, and design skills; and learn about the product development process. It also provides students with an understanding of the economic, financial, legal, and regulatory aspects of the design, development, and commercialization of medical technology. The capstone design experience can change the way engineering students think about technology, society, themselves, and the world around them. It gives them a short preview of what it will be like to work as an engineer. It can make them aware of their potential to make a positive contribution to health care throughout the world and generate excitement for and pride in the engineering profession. Working on teams helps students develop an appreciation for the many ways team members, with different educational, political, ethnic, social, cultural, and religious backgrounds, look at problems. They learn to value diversity and become more willing to listen to different opinions and perspectives. Finally, they learn to value the contributions of nontechnical members of multidisciplinary project teams. Ideas for how to organize, structure, and manage a senior capstone design course for biomedical and other engineering students are presented here. These ideas will be helpful to faculty who are creating a new design course, expanding a current design program to more than the senior year, or just looking for some ideas for improving an existing course. Contents: I. Purpose, Goals, and Benefits / Why Our Students Need a Senior Capstone Design Course / Desired Learning Outcomes / Changing Student Attitudes, Perceptions, and Awarenesss / Senior Capstone Des gn Courses and Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology Outcomes / II. Designing a Course to Meet Student Needs / Course Management and Required Deliverables / Projects and Project Teams / Lecture Topics / Intellectual Property Confidentiality Issues in Design Projects / III. Enhancing the Capstone Design Experience / Industry Involvement in Capstone Design Courses / Developing Business and Entrepreneurial Literacy / Providing Students with a Clinical Perspective / Service Learning Opportunities / Collaboration with Industrial Design Students / National Student Design Competitions / Organizational Support for Senior Capstone Design Courses / IV. Meeting the Changing Needs of Future Engineers / Capstone Design Courses and the Engineer of 2020