Capstone design courses are intended to provide a culminating experience for senior undergraduate engineering majors. Universities vary in how they implement the instruction and implementation of the design process in their capstone courses. For example, many have a separate class in design methods, followed by a one-semester capstone course where teams work on a "design, build, test" project. Other institutions teach design methodology incorporated into the capstone design project in what is often a two-semester capstone sequence. In the cases where design methodology is incorporated into a two-semester capstone course, it is possible that this is the students' first extensive exposure to design methods and process. In that case, students may be experiencing methods such as "Customer Needs Analysis", "Functional Decomposition", "Concept Generation", "Concept Selection" and "Prototype Planning" for the first time. From a constructivist educational standpoint, it can be problematic for students to apply these design techniques for the first time on what is often a complex, real world capstone design problem. One solution to this problem is to incorporate a short design experience at the beginning of the two-semester capstone course. This can allow the students an initial experience with the design methods that can provide a "learning scaffold" for their implementation of the full suite of design methods over the course of a two-semester project. For the last three years, we have implemented three versions of a short, introductory design project (i.e. designette) in our twosemester capstone design sequence. In our uses of the designette project, the suite of five core design methods mentioned above were taught in an abbreviated form. However, in one year the designette lasted ten class hours, the next year's designette lasted 14 class hours, and this past year's project lasted seven class hours. The longest designette allowed for greater depth in the initial coverage of the methods and also provided greater time for prototyping and testing. Of course this was at the cost of consuming a greater percentage of the overall time allocated for the actual capstone design project. This paper reports on the implementation details of the designette projects, focusing in particular on advantages and disadvantages of the different implementations in the most recent years. Faculty and student feedback indicated that the use of the designette does increase student familiarity with the design methods. However, more subtle questions such as the number of lessons allocated for the designette and the depth of coverage of the design methods have much more complicated assessment results.
Systems engineering degree programs are accredited by the Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). The accreditation process includes evaluation of a program's development and assessment of defined student outcomes (SO) (i.e. Criterion 3). These outcomes were recently revised by ABET for programs seeking accreditation in 2019 and later. The systems engineering degree program at the United States Air Force Academy has been twice accredited by ABET and will be revisited in 2020. In preparation for this visit and as part of its continuous improvement process, the Academy has revised its assessment architecture starting with a transition to the new ABET SOs. Following update to the new SOs, observable performance criteria (PC) were also revised. Updated traceability matrices were then developed to map into the Academy's cross-department, multidisciplinary curriculum. These curriculum mappings ensure full coverage of the SOs and serve as a basis for requests for assessment data to the various course directors. It has been observed that this strong traceability and clarity of data required of administering course directors is essential to building a tenable assessment process. This paper provides an overview and roadmap for other systems engineering programs seeking to revise their assessment architecture in preparation for ABET accreditation. The revision process, developed products of the assessment architecture, and observations on their implementation are provided.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.