An International Multiyear Multidisciplinary Capstone Design Project Article Swipe
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· 2020
· Open Access
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· DOI: https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--20934
· OA: W2587149799
An International Multiyear Senior Design ProjectThe Senior Design capstone course(s) has been a major element of engineering education formany years. At our university, it has consisted of a two semester sequence with interdisciplinaryteams of electrical and mechanical engineering students working on projects defined andsponsored by industry. This has helped ensure that real world constraints are included, asrequired by ABET. In the ‘real world’, it is not uncommon today to have projects that areworked on all over the globe and we are trying to bring that reality into our program. Recently,we have started a multi-year experiment of a new kind of capstone project that will be describedand critiqued in this paper. This consists of a 5-year project with a new team coming on everyyear. The project is international in that parts of the project are designed in the USA and part ata university in Europe. The pieces need to fit together for the project to be successful. Thisproject is sponsored by a senior engineer at a multinational company that has high level contactswith government officials in both countries as well as contacts at the universities. We are nowstarting year two of the five year project and have started our third senior design team in theUSA. This project, in addition to the normal challenges of a capstone project, has allowed thestudents to see several new aspects including the necessity of good project documentation as itpassed from one year to the next, the value of multidisciplinary teams (the USA teams have beenmixtures of electrical and mechanical engineering students while the European team has beenaeronautical students), and the challenges of long distance and multicultural communication(thanks to Skype).Our paper further describes the project and discusses the advantages, disadvantages andchallenges of such a long distance, multi-year and international design project. Lessons learnedby both the students and faculty are presented.
