Robotic assembly cell

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.

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.

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 project serves as the culminating experience of most engineering programs. Collaborative design and documentation tools are an integral component of a modern product design and development environment. The Engineering Design Guide and Environment (EDGE), is a web-based system which provides engineers with tools for collaboration on multidisciplinary projects. The EDGE system includes version-controlled repositories for project documentation and design files. By examining the history of changes to these repositories, it is possible to view the usage trends of the system and their relationship to curriculum structure. This paper explores these usage trends with respect to the transition from a quarter-based to a semester-based calendar, the cycle of project deliverables within an academic term, and the transition from a one-day-per-week meeting pattern to a two-day-per-week meeting pattern.

Temple University has developed a program which introduces engineering students to the importance of oral and written communication exercises which are spread across the four years of the engineering curricula. In the first year, students are made aware of the importance of becoming good writers and speakers and how this can impact on their careers. Exercises in proofreading are conducted by a consultant in introductory level classes. In the second year, typical exercises include classroom note taking and short verbal presentations based on the notes. Laboratory journals and more formal laboratory reports are also introduced. Additional laboratory report writing and a formal research paper are emphasized in the third year. An exercise in teamwork is presented in a third year course to help students in the many collaborative projects they encounter in upper level engineering projects. All fourth year students take a full year capstone senior design course which includes many written submissions and oral presentations.

Service learning (SL) is a teaching and learning approach that couples service to a community partner with academic learning for students. Often the objectives of SL courses include academic or technical enhancement, civic engagement, and development of personal and interpersonal skills. A key component of SL is critical reflection, which is expected to help the students understand the significance of civic engagement as well as course contents. The civic engagement aspect of this educational approach aligns well with the service-oriented nature of the civil engineering profession. SL projects have been conducted in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Capstone Senior Design course at the University of Vermont since 2006. Students submit written semi-guided reflections on their experience at the conclusion of the course. The student reflections from 2011 through 2014 (n = 154 male and 61 female from a total of 50 different SL projects) were analyzed to assess if there is any difference in the attitude toward SL between male versus female students. The results of this analysis are presented here.

This paper presents the findings of a study comparing the motivational factors and performance of two mechanical engineering senior capstone design course cohorts: 2014 and 2015 students. The study measures the motivation of students throughout capstone, a non-traditional course, and the impacts motivation had on their course performance (peer evaluations and team grade). The second cohort participated in an intervention plan during a design methodologies course completed the semester prior to senior capstone design. Quantitative data was collected at both the beginning and end of the course; whereas, qualitative data was collected at the end of the course. Our method utilizes an adapted version of the Motivational Student Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ). The survey asks a variety of questions to measure the performance and motivation levels of the student. Performance factors studied are cognitive value and self-regulation. Motivation factors include presentation anxiety, intrinsic value, and self-efficacy. Statistical analysis is performed among the factors, cohort populations, and within the population (male versus females and domestic versus international) to identify if a correlation exists with student course performance. Amongst other findings, the results indicate the student’s experienced positive change due to participation in the intervention plan.

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

Why Our Students Need a Senior Capstone Design Course

Mechanical design education focuses on teaching students with fundamental design theory and methodology. Educators systematically introduce design theories, processes, and tools to help students solve design problems. Companies and professional organizations expect that students will be equipped with basic understanding of the engineering practice, and be able to effectively perform independently and in a team environment. Senior capstone design courses, particularly with industry sponsored projects, are widely used to satisfy both education and professional needs of students. This paper presents an education system, which can further facilitate students to acquire design skills in a real-time collaborative, and practical environment. The web-based system helps student teams to: (1) specify the design process for their team projects, (2) organize and distribute tasks among different team members to simulate industry design environment, and (3) get instantaneous access to models, analysis, etc. related to their design. The developed web-based system also contains a knowledge-base that provides students with instructions to setup the design process for projects, and to perform different design tasks. A virtual design organization is created in the system, which is managed by students. In this paper different components of the web-based design education system are presented.

The Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at West Point has recently established a multi-disciplinary research and educational outreach center that has a two-fold mission: enhance the undergraduate educational experience of students and assist in solving real-world technical problems, supporting global Army operations. This is accomplished by tying projects directly to the undergraduate education mission and gaining efficiency by consolidating administrative and outreach functions for multiple existing research programs. The paper describes the Center for Innovation and Engineering (CIE), its lines of effort, and several past and current initiatives. Assessment data from students participating in the senior capstone design course, which is closely tied to the CIE, reinforces the importance of multi-disciplinary, client-based projects in the engineering education experience.

A senior capstone design course entitled Integrated Product and Process Design has been jointly developed and taught at Brigham Young University by faculty from the departments of both mechanical and manufacturing engineering. The course features a structured approach to product and process design based on the Quality Function Deployment system. Teams of four to five students from both mechanical and manufacturing engineering work on selected, industrially sponsored design projects. These projects require both design and manufacturing solutions. The students are required to develop both functional prototypes and manufacturable production samples. An industrial environment is fostered in the course. The content of the course and an evaluation of its effectiveness are discussed. >

It is sometimes forgotten that industry is an important customer of engineering education. Ignoring this relationship has produced graduates that often fail to meet the changing needs of industry in today's competitive environment. On the basis of feedback from our industrial customers, faculty from Mechanical Engineering and Manufacturing Engineering at Brigham Young University have jointly developed a new senior capstone design course entitled “Integrated Product and Process Design.” This new capstone course is centered on industrial design and manufacturing projects. These projects involve both product and process design activities. Multidisciplinary teams of students are taught a structured development approach to produce typical industrial deliverables. These deliverables include a functional specification, product and process design, prototype, and first production sample. This paper identifies changing industrial needs, describes how the course was designed to meet these needs, and presents results from the initial offerings of the course.

Teaching senior design courses and labs has not been an easy task for the two authors. It has been rather a daunting working task associated with great learning experiences. It was decided early on from the initiation of the mechanical engineering program at the McCoy School of Engineering at Midwestern State University that the senior design project within the senior design class is a testing and enriching experience for senior mechanical engineering students as well as the teaching faculty. The senior design course and labs are conducted as a research experience for undergraduate students and their assigned faculty. The proposed senior project spans over two semesters, fall and spring, where the students experience a full mechanical engineering related project from the inception phase, through the design and construction phases, and finishing with the testing and analysis phases. The inception phase stands essentially for the brainstorming phase where the students are required to come-up with a set of diverse solutions to their assigned project problem. The design and construction phases stand for choosing an optimal particular solution for their problem according to a set of defined criteria. Then, the students start the preliminary design phase with related cost estimation, and then finalize the design with a set of final drawings. After the design phase, the students start building a machine, an apparatus, a prototype or putting together the elements of a process. In this period they work intensely, with their faculty, the purchasing department, and mostly the department machinist, or the surrounding town machine shops. The testing and analysis phase stands for designing an experimental set-up, writing a testing procedure, and obtaining real time recorded data and proceeding with its analysis. In this technical paper, the authors talk about the requirements for a senior project known as the deliverables, the teaching tools used throughout the class work and labs, the students’ partial and final PowerPoints presentations and weekly and final reports. The authors describe the students overall achievements, and the archiving of the projects. Additionally, the authors talk about the twists and turns encountered during a senior project, with students, other faculty, the machinist, the lab technician, the secretary, and suppliers, and other difficulties experienced in running a full project with real final products. Finally, the authors talk about the aftermath of a senior project, eventual publications related to the project, and what is the view point of the American Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) on these senior projects.

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.