scholarly journals The Forgotten Steps of Engineering Design: Design-Build Experiences and their Downstream Effect on Capstone Design Projects

Author(s):  
William Guilford ◽  
Timothy Allen ◽  
Shayn Peirce
Author(s):  
Chris Rennick ◽  
Eugene Li

The capstone design project is ubiquitous in engineering programs worldwide, and is seen by students as the single most important activity in their undergraduate careers. Staff and faculty at the University of Waterloo identified three issues with the current capstone process: students are unaware of industrial suppliers, they lack multi-disciplinary exposure, and they often struggle to identify "good" needs for their projects. The Engineering IDEAs Clinic, with support from instructors and staff from across Engineering, developed a conference for students to address these issues. EngCon – aimed at students in third/fourth year – brought students together with their peers from other programs, instructors from across the Faculty, and representatives from suppliers (both external industry, and internal support units) with the goal of improving their capstone projects. This paper presents the design and implementation of EngCon in both 2017 and 2018 with lessons learned from offering a large coordinated set of workshops aimed at students as they enter their capstone design projects.  


Author(s):  
Vincent Wilczynski ◽  
Andrew C. Foley

The assessment of Student Outcomes is an import component for program evaluation and improvement. Though not proposed as the only tool a program should employ to measure the achievement of outcomes, the capstone design course can be a valuable mechanism to measure performance with regards to Student Outcomes. Because of the expansive reach of the engineering design process, capstone design projects present a natural environment to structure assessment activities that directly map to Student Outcomes. This paper presents versions of the Mechanical Engineering capstone design course that have been specifically structured to assess achievement of Student Outcomes commonly included in engineering accreditation criteria. Typically the outcomes are assessed by assignments that guide the engineering design process.


Author(s):  
David G. Alciatore

Abstract This paper describes three-dimensional computer graphics simulation (CGS) and how it can be applied as a useful tool in a capstone design course in Mechanical Engineering. The necessary hardware and software to perform CGS is also outlined. Three examples of senior design projects at Colorado State University which utilized 3-D CGS to help revise and verify their designs are also presented.


Author(s):  
Holly R. Algra ◽  
Clifton R. Johnston

Engineers are, in general, poor atconsidering human factors in our designs. Human factorsare an important aspect of engineering design that mustbe introduced and nurtured in all engineers, but is achallenging problem. We have undertaken a case study ofa past capstone design project to evaluate how humanfactors were considered. This paper will present a casestudy of this project’s application of human factors.Our work hopes to identify what influenced anincreased consideration of human factors, which led tothe success of this project. A combination of diversifiedbackgrounds may have played a significant factor in thedesign process, but there were, however, likely otherfactors that impacted the team’s performance. Ourultimate goal is to use the information gained from thiscase study to develop training and design tools toincrease usability of other projects.


Author(s):  
Vincent Chang

With a growing need to reform Chinese higher engineering education, University of Michigan—Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute (JI) initiated multinational corporation-sponsored industrial-strength Capstone Design Projects (CDP) in 2011. Since 2011, JI has developed 96 corporate-sponsored CDPs since its inception, which include multinational corporation sponsors such as Covidien, Dover, GE, HP, Intel, NI, Philips, and Siemens. Of these projects, healthcare accounts for 27%, energy 24%, internet technology (IT) 22%, electronics 16%, and other industries 11%. This portfolio reflects the trends and needs in the industry, which provides opportunities for engineering students to develop their careers. An accumulated 480 JI students have been teamed up based on their individual backgrounds, specifically electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, and biomedical engineering. The corporate-sponsored rate grew from 0% in 2010 to 86% in 2014.


Author(s):  
Mahmoud Dinar ◽  
Yong-Seok Park ◽  
Jami J. Shah

Conventional syllabi of engineering design courses either do not pay enough attention to conceptual design skills, or they lack an objective assessment of those skills to show students’ progress. During a semester-long course of advanced engineering product design, we assigned three major design projects to twenty five students. For each project we asked them to formulate the problems in the Problem Formulator web-based testbed. In addition, we collected sketches for all three design problems, feasibility analyses for the last two, and a working prototype for the final project. We report the students’ problem formulation and ideation in terms of a set of nine problem formulation characteristics and ASU’s ideation effectiveness metrics respectively. We discuss the limitations that the choice of the design problems caused, and how the progress of a class of students during a semester-long design course resulted in a convergence in sets of metrics that we have defined to characterize problem formulation and ideation. We also review the results of students of a similar course which we reported last year in order to find common trends.


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