(547a) Capstone Design with Practical Characteristics for a New Era

The capstone design class serves the needs of a wide range of stakeholders. Students need to experience working on a design project where they can see how the academic concepts from foundation classes can be brought to bear on a large realistic engineering problem. They also need to learn enough about economic analysis, optimization and equipment specification to be competent and confident in entry level roles in industry. In many schools the senior design course also fills in various other gaps in the students’ knowledge to better prepare them to enter the workforce. Educators often struggle to balance these competing needs. Many schools use Adjunct faculty to create a more authentic experience for the students, but at the risk of teaching design techniques that may have been best practice over forty years ago.

Design is intrinsically a constrained optimization problem, and so is the construction of a well-balanced capstone course that effectively meets the needs of students (regardless of their intended career path), employers (regardless of their sector of industry or commerce) and broader stakeholders such as ABET, professional engineering societies and the general public. Some things that are easily learned in a University are much harder to learn on the job and vice versa, and instructors need a good feel for the relative importance of topics and experiences to ensure they have optimized time allocation, project selection and student outcomes. I will share how my experiences as an instructor, adjunct advisor, textbook author and employer helped shape my formulation of the problem. As always in design, there is no single right answer!