Capstone Design: Insights from an International Collaborative Student Team

Abstract

Since 2005 the Civil Engineering Department at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT) has had at least one international capstone design project each year. For each of those projects, the student team worked on a project for a client in another country. This year the international project was designed by an international collaborative student team. Three students from RHIT were paired with three students from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana to design a project in Ghana. The academic grades for all six students were inextricably linked; therefore, the six were forced to work collaboratively in order to produce a successful design.In order to complete the project, the team had to overcome several new challenges. Although all six students spoke English, their dialects and accents were very different. Adding to the communication challenges was the need to work remotely. The students were unable to meet face-to-face. In addition, only the KNUST students were able to visit the project site, so they had to relay critical information to the RHIT students.The instructors also had to overcome challenges. The two schools were on different term schedules. The capstone design courses had different durations, learning objectives, and deliverables. Therefore, the instructors had to adapt their expectations and demands on the students in order to facilitate the collaboration within the team.This paper provides unique insights and lessons learned from both the student and instructor perspective. It shows how well the student team achieved the educational outcomes, and summarizes the benefits the students gained beyond technical skills. The paper concludes with recommendations for programs that would like to develop an international collaborative student team experience. Introduction:Capstone design is long standing tradition in civil engineering and required by ABET for accreditation (ABET 2011). The importance of exposing students to cultures other than their own has been emphasized as important for engineers for some time (Friedman 2005). At Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT), we have been combining the two experiences for at least one capstone design team each year since 2005. For the first six years, the students' interaction with other cultures was limited to communication with the client, the user of the facility they were designing. Of those six years, three of the projects were obtained through the