Developing an Interview Protocol for an Engineering Capstone Design Course

A critical open question in the mechanical engineering pedagogical literature is whether Capstone senior design can be taught as effectively online as in-person with emphasis on whether group work conducted under these contrasting conditions is equally effective. The onset of COVID-19 induced a natural experiment enabling comparison of engineering student group work conducted in-person versus all-online. Group work is an essential element of mechanical engineering education codified by Student Outcome 5 of ABET Criterion 3 (Groupwork). Peer evaluation is a common engineering group work assessment, especially in Capstone design courses. In this paper, recurring peer evaluations are evaluated to quantify how well students performed in groups within a longitudinal study conducted across five semesters of a mechanical engineering Capstone senior design course. In UF’s Mechanical Engineering Capstone courses, recuring peer evaluation surveys tied to group assignment deadlines were already established prior to COVID-19. By continuing to deploy this same survey when courses transitioned online during the pandemic, three full semesters of group performance data were collected when students were forced to meet remotely. As students returned to campus, the same survey provided comparative data for two semesters when students were meeting in person. These collected data represent a quantitative tool to evaluate how online vs. in-person group meeting setting impacts the quality of teamwork. This work shows that online vs. in-person meeting environments DID NOT have statistically significant impacts on teamwork performance for mechanical engineering Capstone students in the semesters being evaluated. This result suggests that ABET Criterion 3 Student Outcome 5 can be met just as effectively in online or in-person Capstone courses. This important result debunks the misconception that the quality and fidelity of Capstone groupwork is somehow diminished when senior design is taught online to learners remote from each other over the Internet. This finding adds to the growing body of evidence supporting the viability of an all-online Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering program capable of receiving and maintaining ABET accreditation. Moreover, a forward-looking online ME program can include an effective Capstone senior design course with rich student groupwork interactions of quality equal to those experienced by students when meeting in-person.

The purpose of this study is to examine how industry sponsors influence student engagement in mechanical engineering capstone design courses. While sponsor partnerships are intended to enhance the authenticity of capstone experiences, their involvement can shape how students participate in and value design activities. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, we analyzed semi-structured interviews with nine students from two industry-sponsored capstone teams selected for their contrasting sponsor interactions. Findings indicate that sponsors affect engagement through structural mechanisms (namely, role assignment, role enactment, and influence over design processes), and relational mechanisms (communication practices and investment in student success). High-autonomy role selection, flexible role boundaries, and opportunities for design agency-supported engagement, ownership, and alignment with professional practice. In contrast, sponsor-imposed roles, rigid task boundaries, limited decision-making authority, and low responsiveness often led to frustration, reduced ownership, and disengagement. We conclude that sponsor preparation is critical for supporting student engagement in capstone design. Providing sponsors with clear guidelines to promote student agency, facilitate collaboration, and maintain meaningful communication can help ensure that industry partnerships serve both the educational and professional goals of capstone.

Senior capstone design courses provide students the opportunity to develop their design skills and learn about the product development process. Student project teams, a number of which are industry-sponsored, often develop creative design solutions that result in the creation of intellectual property. When this occurs, who owns the intellectual property: the student, faculty advisors, industry sponsors, or academic institutions? The paper discusses how academic institutions, such as the Marquette University, deal with intellectual property and confidentiality issues in senior capstone design courses, in particular those that deal with biomedical engineering.

Senior design projects can be a way to bring the university closer to societal needs. This paper describes how the senior capstone design courses in power engineering developed at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagiiez (UPRM) strive to provide a service to society. These projects deal with societal needs, and are part of design courses that culminate the major design experience as specified by ABET. Teams of students identify a society-based problem, propose a design solution, perform measurements/simulations and present the final analysis and design to an industry or community partner. An important aspect of the projects is the inclusion of both technical and social constraints such as safety and environmental issues. These design experiences are an ideal way to understanding the new challenges in power systems planning, policy, analysis and design

Assessment in capstone engineering design courses is vital to engineering education programs. The capstone design course is the climax of design education and often the context for much of the assessment done in engineering degree programs. Capstone design course instructors’ admittedly low confidence for assessing student performance in these courses poses a crucial obstacle to the assessment process. A key issue is a lack of clear outcomes definition for engineering design and sound, defensible assessments for these outcomes. This paper draws from findings in design literature and from engineering design education experience to construct a conceptual model of engineering design that guides development of associated design learning outcomes and assessment of student achievements in design. A conceptual model of design is vital to design education, because it is one of three essential cornerstones— model, observation, and interpretation— for constructing assessments. In the context of an engineering classroom, design performance produces two different and complementary types of outcomes: learner development and solution development. Further, design is: open-ended, iterative, creative, collaborative, goal-driven, process-intensive, productfocused, customer-oriented, value-added, and constrained by society. Learner and solution development usually progresses from a state of students’ fragmented understanding and ideas to a more mature state of integrated understanding and design solutions. The proposed conceptual model for engineering design identifies four areas of performance that describe design: (1) personal capacity, (2) team processes, (3) solution requirements, and (4) solution assets. The first two characterize learner development and the latter two characterize solution development. Personal capacity is the designer’s development of skills which support technically sound and responsible design. Team processes address a team’s behaviors and productivity in design activities. Solution requirements address the team’s understanding of stakeholder needs and concerns. Solution assets encompass the value added, practicality, and impact of the design solution. These four performance areas are essential to design. They identify performances that develop over time, contribute to the success of design outcomes, and stimulate growth in one another for integrated enhancement of design performance. They also provide the basis for a versatile, comprehensive definition of engineering design performance that can guide instruction and can focus assessments in capstone engineering design courses.

This paper describes the senior computer engineering capstone design course at Washington University in St. Louis. As part of this course, three-student teams develop a complete 8-bit microprocessor using a hardware description language (VHDL) and implement their designs in a small FPGA. Programmed FPGAs are "booted" at the end of the course and tested for accuracy. Students also write an assembler or a simple calculator for their microprocessor. This paper describes the microprocessor architecture and tool flow used in the course.

One of the more difficult tasks in engineering education is to effectively teach the concept of “design.” The design process is very broad and involves a wide range of activities, from abstract thinking to detailed modeling and calculations. In Engineering Design, author Rudolph J. Eggert presents a well-structured and thorough overview of engineering design concepts and methods. A major strength of this book is the presentation of the overall design process, the illustration of the systematic concepts that are involved in every phase of design, and definitions of the terms that are used in design. The author has experience with various organizations, including General Electric, Fisher-Price Toys, Wurlitzer, and the New York State Energy and Development Authority, and that experience with the design process no doubt contributed to the effective organization of this text. The author states that this is a text for undergraduate or firstyear graduate engineering students. He also states that the book has a focus of integrating engineering design with topics about the business of manufacturing. This reviewer teaches civil engineering. In my opinion this textbook might be particularly appropriate for use in senior-level capstone design courses. It is my observation that engineering educators are very good at teaching the science of design. By this I mean they are good at making appropriate engineering calculations once a design concept has been established. However, the more abstract processes of design, such as developing an initial design concept or working with customers, are not as easy to teach. The strength of this textbook is its presentation of a coherent structure for understanding the more abstract processes. In this book Rudolph Eggert provides a systematic description for every phase of the design process. Chapter 3 gives an example of the design of a motorcycle that clearly illustrates the steps involved in developing design concepts. Other examples in the text also use items that students can relate to, including the design of a coffee pot and the manufacturing of bicycles. The discussion of customer satisfaction curves, in Chapters 3 and 8, is particularly useful in terms of providing the basis for the concepts of performance functions and ultimately multicriteria decision analysis techniques. These tools provide a basis for both guiding decisions as well as documenting decisions made during the design process. Chapter 10 covers topics of design failure, safety, and environment that it is crucial to present to engineering students. Finally, Chapter 14 on Projects, Teamwork, and Ethics has some very useful material. While I believe that this would be a textbook strongly worth considering for an engineering capstone design course, as a civil engineer I would have liked some detailed examples of design that relate to large, one-of-a-kind projects. While the material

BACKGROUND Capstone design courses seek to prepare engineering students for industry by challenging student teams to solve real-world problems. To improve this preparation, university programs have recently focused on creating multidisciplinary teams. However, there is limited quantitative evidence showing that multidisciplinary student engineering teams develop higher quality projects or are better prepared for the work force.

본 논문은 공학교육과정에서 사용되는 캡스톤디자인 교과목에 대한 평가체계의 개발 사례를 소개한다. 캡스톤디자인은 대학 과정에서 배운 전문지식을 종합적으로 활용하여, 산업현장의 문제를 분석하고 해결책을 설계하는 교과목이다. 본 논문에서는 캡스톤디자인 교과목과 관련된 기존의 평가 요소, 평가 방법 및 절차를 설명한다. 이를 기반으로 개발된 캡스톤디자인 평가체계를 소개한다. 본 논문에서 제시한 캡스톤디자인 교과목의 학습성과 평가체계는 타대학의 캡스톤디자인 교과목 운영 시 일부 참고될 수 있으며, 산학이 연계된 교육 및 인턴 프로그램 개발 시 평가체계 설계를 위해서도 사용될 수 있다. This paper introduces a case study on the development of the evaluation system for capstone design course which is usually provided at engineering education program. A capstone design is an engineering education course which aims to improve the students' ability on analysis and design of practical industrial problems by use of overall engineering knowledge which has been learned in undergraduate program. Firstly, this paper provides a literature review on evaluation indices and methods related with a capstone design course. Secondly, the evaluation system for learning outcomes of capstone design course is described. The evaluation system for learning outcomes of capstone design course provided in this paper could be referred by other universities opening a capstone design course, and used to design an evaluation system for internship program or education course which is provided as an industry-academic connection program.

In non-engineering departments such as cosmetology as well, capstone design has been operated as an educational program and evaluation method, generating some positive educational effects. To examine the adoption of capstone design among domestic cosmetology-related college curriculums, this study investigated the total number of credits granted, distribution of academic departments by school, supporting units within academic departments and schools and receipt of government subsidy from the Ministry of Education, and the results found the followings: In 2018, a total of 3,590 students from 31 departments under school of natural sciences and 22 departments under school of art and physical education completed cosmetology-related capstone design courses. In average, each student was assisted by KRW 90,532. The supporting units were operated in cooperation with office of academic affairs (23 colleges), academia-industry cooperation foundation (21 colleges) and strategic support center for government-funded projects (8 colleges). The course titles differed by college. In fact, new and unique capstone design course titles have been used by academic major. It is anticipated that the study results would be available as basic data needed to enhance educational effects for applying capstone design courses and planning government-funded projects, search new items and improve their utilization.

Senior design and capstone courses are an integral part of any engineering curriculum around the world. These courses perhaps provide the only opportunity for students to apply the theoretical knowledge and technical skills they have acquired throughout the engineering degree. Moreover, they are often the (sole) environment in which students get some of the professional and transversal skills too. In addition, such courses present a great degree of nonuniformity since the students engage in projects of different nature (e.g., research oriented versus application oriented). Furthermore, not only do these courses prepare students for real-life engineering practice, they also serve as a major component in measuring program outcomes. The survey conducted over two decades ago by Todd et al. [item [1] in the Appendix], which collected responses from 360 departments across 173 schools, highlighted many of the issues related with capstone courses that are still relevant today. Such issues include course format, different degrees of faculty involvement, and project completion requirements. Indeed, all points highlighted thus far emphasize the importance of adequately designing and assessing capstone design courses.

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

The impact of cognitive mode diversity on team performance and student satisfaction was assessed qualitatively and quantitatively in a capstone chemical engineering design course. In the capstone design course, students were permitted to form their own teams and the distribution of cognitive modes was assessed. In a concurrent design course, the same group of students performed projects in instructor-formed teams that optimized the distribution of cognitive modes. The results indicated no significant difference in team satisfaction between teams that had different levels of cognitive diversity. Although trends seemed to indicate higher rank in the course and greater independence and creativity for groups with higher cognitive diversity, these differences were not statistically significant. Generally, students seemed to have similar experiences in student-formed and instructor-formed groups. However, qualitative comments seem to indicate that groups may have worked more professionally and cohesively in the more cognitively-diverse, instructor-formed groups.

The capstone design course is a senior level course in large number of civil engineering and construction programs. This course bridges the gap between education and industry by emphasizing project-based learning, asking students to accomplish open-ended project planning and system design. This study aims to investigate the potential of incorporating service learning into capstone courses in Civil Engineering, Construction Engineering, and Construction Management curricula. To accomplish this objective, a questionnaire is designed and will be distributed among alumni of Purdue University as well as Durham School of Architecture Engineering and Construction. The questionnaire is asking about the main learning objectives of the current capstone courses, objectives that can be better covered by a service learning project, and the most practical, efficient, and systematic way to incorporate service learning into capstone courses. The results of this study can be used to successfully incorporate service learning as a more advanced authentic performance task into the capstone senior design course and increase the student's experience with real-world issues, and enhance required skills such as project management, project planning, and cost analysis and estimation.

The capstone design course allows students to synthesize solutions to open ended problems. However without some urging, the students tend to focus on the easy part of the project-a single technical solution. The paper deals with some experience in bringing the more demanding aspects of technical projects into the design course. These include: (1) defining the real project with your customer will we know when we're done?. (2) Planning for success. Resource analysis-time, money knowledge, equipment and all of their interactions. (3) What is the best solution? Holding design reviews and comparing alternatives. (4) Communication skills. How do you keep the design team, the boss, and the customer up to date? (5) Presentation of project information in written and verbal forms. (6) Team dynamics. How to support the development of high performance teams? (7) Social skills. Why do I have to deal differently with Mary than with Anne to get their commitment and support? (8) Conflict. Why you need it and how to manage it. Each of the above topics could be a course in itself, but the capstone design course is an ideal place to discuss and exhibit the interaction of these complex issues. These discussions sow the seeds that will allow our graduates to perform at a higher level in all of their future project activities.