Creating corporate world experience in capstone courses

Abstract

Many engineering capstone courses require senior design projects involving teamwork. The curricula at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Donaghey CyberCollege engages local industries in providing meaningful design projects for student teams in real world settings. Both St. Vincent Health System and Heifer International sponsored capstone design teams in yearlong projects. These projects resulted in the students gaining professional skills, the industries gaining products that saved money and won awards, and the CyberCollege faculty gaining understanding and experience for developing its engineering curricula. Engineering educators who want to provide real-world experience to graduating seniors may benefit from learning how we obtained corporate sponsors for the projects, created student-consulting teams, and developed a capstone course incorporating system design theory. They may also gain insight from discussions about our methods for student evaluations and about the lessons we learned from our experimental capstone course.

A Multidisciplinary Capstone Design Project to Satisfy ABET Student Outcomes

“…e faculty role is as a mentor or senior advisor, but not as a traditional instructor. e descriptions of the capstone instructor role are mentioned in the previous literature as mentor, facilitator, advisor, and coach but not as an instructor [4][5][6][7][8][9]. ere are no faculty lectures in the capstone project.…”

Characterizing capstone design teaching: A functional taxonomy

“…Instead, they develop students' ability to address open‐ended problems by working collaboratively, drawing on prior knowledge, seeking new information, and generating and evaluating design alternatives (Howe, ; Howe et al, ; Pembridge & Paretti, ; Todd, Magleby, Sorensen, Swan, & Anthony, ). Literature on capstone teaching uses terms such as mentor, facilitator, advisor, and coach, often interchangeably, to describe the roles that capstone faculty play (Bruhn & Camp, ; Howe, ; Howe, Rosenbauer, & Poulos, ; Kolmos & De Graaff, ; Manuel, McKenna, & Olson, ; Rover, ; Sternberg, Johnson, Moen, & Hoover, ).…”

An Examination of Mentoring Functions in the Capstone Course

“…As such, capstone courses have been recognized as one of the most common implementations of project-based learning in engineering education 4 . Students in the capstone course are involved in realistic projects that provide them with the opportunity to apply knowledge from prior science and engineering coursework to analyze and solve engineering problems, while emphasizing professional skills such as written and oral communication and teamwork [5][6][7] .…”

“…Faculty teaching in project-based environments also have a strong role in classroom management and procedural facilitation throughout the project 9 . Across the literature on capstone courses, these functions typically fall into three structural categories (with many instructors operating in multiple categories): instructors that lead class meetings, course coordinators that are responsible for class management as the assignment of grades, and project advisors who provide technical guidance, and industry representatives that support and guide the project problem [5][6][7] . In each of these position, faculty members engage in activities that fall under the general heading of "mentoring."…”