Who, What, and When? Exploring Student Focus in the Capstone Design Experience

Abstract

Product development is a key component of engineering education taught at a number of universities through their capstone design course. This course provides students with an opportunity to apply their newly obtained knowledge in engineering to design, build, and test working prototypes. This educational approach also encourages students to place additional attention on time and group management. As students walk through the design process, their focus fluctuates between group organization, product development, and course deliverables. This paper observes this variation in focus to extract key insights related to who is focusing on what and when. Data was collected in the form of individual project journals for each student and these provide a detailed look into the design activities throughout the semester allowing for a focus mapping from week to week. The focus of each student is quantified by a topic distribution of each student’s weekly journal entries, automatically extracted using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Our results place emphasis on the topic identification accuracy and interpretation, before identifying trends found that separate high performing students and groups from those with poor performances. It was found that efficient time management focusing on the required course deliverables, and group cohesion led to the most impactful performance variations. Using this knowledge, we identify future directions supporting the pedagogy for capstone projects.

Supporting management of new product development via a novel conceptual model: an interview driven approach

“…Dong et al (2004) review design documentation and verbal communications of student design teams to compare performance and semantic coherence (Dong, 2005). They found positive correlations between semantic similarity and team performance, agreeing with previous studies (Ball et al , 2020; Martin and Foltz, 2004). These studies however take a posteriori approach by reviewing previously completed projects and their respective documentations.…”

“…One of the most influential factors internal to an organization when performing NPD is the ability to build a collective understanding of the task (Bittner and Leimeister, 2014). Multiple studies have confirmed this phenomenon showing improved success of teams with a shared understanding (Ball et al , 2020; Ball and Lewis, 2018b; Koutsikouri et al , 2008; Langan-Fox et al , 2004; Mathieu et al , 2000; Mohammed et al , 2010). Building a shared understanding within heterogenous product teams requires a top down approach of aligned objectives along with a bottom up realization of integrated project components (Austin et al , 2007).…”

“…Additionally, individual competencies have been identified through surveying industry experts (Chen and Mohamed, 2008; Walsh and Linton, 2002) and engineering graduates (Male et al , 2010), using a rubrics-based methodology (Pop-Iliev and Platanitis, 2008), assessing functional, processual and holistic shaping competencies (Sedelmaier and Landes, 2014) and the development of hierarchal competency models (Wells, 2008). Additional approaches have considered competency identification through automated topic discovery in combination with design performance (Ball et al , 2020; Ball and Lewis, 2020). These efforts work to efficiently improve human resource management through a more comprehensive measure of individual ability.…”

Let’s Get Ready for Work – Employability Skills Development in an IS Capstone Project

“…Because selfmanagement is so interdependent with employability skills such as teamwork and inter-communication, most students performing capstone projects did not explicitly report improvements in this area (Keller et al, 2011). However, efficient time management focused on the required course deliverables, as well as group cohesion, resulted in the most significant outcomes (Ball et al, 2020).…”

Communication patterns in engineering enterprise social networks: an exploratory analysis using short text topic modelling

“…Specifically, topic modelling has been used in product design for studying the impact of various interventions on design (Fu, Cagan & Kotovsky 2010; Gyory, Kotovsky & Cagan 2021 a ), to comparing human and AI teams (Gyory et al 2021 b ), to analysing capstone team performance (Ball, Bessette & Lewis 2020), to visualising engineering student identity (Park et al 2020), to deriving new product design features from online reviews (Song et al 2020; Zhou et al 2020) and identifying areas for cross-domain inspiration (Ahmed & Fuge 2018). By plotting a design team’s topic mixtures before and after a manager intervention, Gyory et al (2021 a ) were able to measure the result of the design intervention and whether it helped to bring the team back on track.…”