Current Practices in Final Year Engineering Design Courses

Vincent, Colin; Wild, Peter

doi:10.24908/pceea.v0i0.3809

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…The Canadian and American engineering CE is required for accreditation and must include a culminating design experience [14], [15]. In [16], the authors surveyed 25 engineering capstone courses across Canada and found that all involved delivery through a group project, which was then assessed via a written report, an oral presentation, and in some cases a working prototype. In most cases, the projects were found to be open-ended, and the problems had been generated from either the faculty advisor's research program, an industry partner, or in some cases the problem had been student generated.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Student and Faculty Perceptions of Capstone Purposes: What Can Engineering Learn From Other Disciplines?

Vale

Gordon

Kirkscey

et al. 2020

PCEEA

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Capstone Experiences (CE) are meant to integrate and culminate the student experience. The most common CE in the Canadian and American engineering curriculums is the final year design course, but other disciplines also have capstone experiences. This paper presents initial results from a multi-institutional, multi-national survey of faculty and student perceptions of capstone experiences. Here, we investigate three criteria (Values, Skills/competencies, Attitudes) and discuss differences and similarities among the disciplines and between engineering students and faculty. There is good alignment between engineering faculty and students, but values such as openness and compassion are selected at (comparatively) lower rates by engineering faculty and students than by other disciplines. These findings provide an opportunity for engineering educators to reflect on the intentions of their CE; e.g., are these results an intentional outcome of engineering capstones, or an oversight on the part of engineering educators?

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Student and Faculty Perceptions of Capstone Purposes: What Can Engineering Learn From Other Disciplines?

Vale

Gordon

Kirkscey

et al. 2020

PCEEA

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“…By rolling the design forward annually the projects have become multi-year design projects. These mandatory large team projects usually involve around 30 students making them larger than the typical group project team size average of 3.3 reported in the 2007 survey by Vincent and Wild [4]. Running such a project requires additional management and organization over a smaller group project that are typically managed by a single Faculty member.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

GeoSurv II Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: A major undergraduate project with

Steele¹,

Laliberté²

2011

PCEEA

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A final year undergraduate capstone design project was run in 2010-2011 and involved 32 students, 8 lead engineers and a project manager. The project was to design, develop and build an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that can be used for geophysical surveying and was carried out in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Carleton University. It built upon previous years work and involved students mostly from the Aerospace Engineering and Mechanical Engineering BEng programs. However, there was cross-department input, with students from the BEng programs Computer and Systems Engineering, Software Engineering and Communication Engineering, who undertook their final year project working on the avionics. Students were split into groups with lead engineers guiding the groups and individuals, plus there was an overall project manager. The groups were aerodynamics, avionics, flight test, integration and structures. The lead engineers were faculty, sessional lecturers and one graduate student teaching assistant. Sessional lecturers brought experience from the military and government research laboratories. Individual groups met weekly and additionally all students from all groups met collectively, again weekly, to share and discuss progress and issues. Students were required to produce design reports, as well as a group final report and each term a formal design review. Besides the development of GeoSurv II a new UAV design, named Corvus, was started and 10 students, drawn from across the different groups, worked on the preliminary design with the aim to produce a demonstrator vehicle. This paper describes the organization and running of such a large, multidisciplined group project as well as giving details of student opinions taken throughout the project's progress over the academic year.

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“…Projects in many capstone courses, including the one that we developed, differ greatly in scope [2], or in other terms, breadth and depth.…”

Section: Flexibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%