Examining the Structure of a Multidisciplinary Engineering Capstone Design Program

Abstract

Rogers joined the university in October, 2008 bringing with him 35 years of industrial experience. His career includes senior leadership roles in engineering, sales, and manufacturing in robotics, electronics, sensors, and controls industries. Throughout his career, Rogers has developed products using an innovative process consisting of multidisciplinary teams focused on understanding customer needs and converting them to commercially viable products and services. He brings this experience to the university where he leads the effort in developing company-sponsored, product-oriented Capstone design programs. As part of the mission of the Engineering Education Innovation Center (EEIC), Rogers has co-led the development of an ABET approved curriculum for a year-long Capstone experience. With a focus on providing students with a broader experience base, the multidisciplinary program applies teams of engineers, business, design, and other students to work with Ohio companies to help them be more competitive. Teams apply a company's core competencies to help develop new products and markets. This experiential learning emphasizes real-world problem solving, professional communication and ethics, teamwork, and implementation of a formalized design process. Additionally, Rogers has created the Social Innovation and Commercialization initiative by collaborating with business, engineering, and design colleges. Partnering with local non-profit organizations, teams define unmet problems working with people with various disabilities-problems that can be solved with an innovative product. The educational goal is to provide experiential learning with a social outreach. The social goal is to produce income to help non-profit partners become self-sustaining while improving the independence of people with disabilities. Rogers earned his PhD at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst focused on mechanical engineering and manufacturing. He has presented a number of industrial conference papers and holds several patents. He served as co-chair of the organizing committee for the 2012 Capstone Design Conference and is hosting the Conference at Ohio State in June 2014. He holds the position of Professor of Practice at The Ohio State University.

Priming and Mining the Civil Engineering Mindset: How Personal Values and Perfectionism Shape Societal Engagement and Consideration in Design

“…Lastly, Rhoads & Schrock's (2023) where students showed skills of working in diverse teams, developed team value, inclusivity and efficiency and empathic decision making in the design process, skills of calibration between their 'perceived' and 'actual' performance and knowledge of cognitive level, and lastly, trained students to "to reflect and modify their problem identification as they gain knowledge progressing through the design process" and avoid 'jumping to conclusions'. This paper addresses a change made to a curriculum that resulted in cultivating empathic design thinking in a Multidisciplinary Design Capstone course, by attending to the enhancement of the listed skills like sense of belonging, stereotype threat, calibration and retrieval, in the course.…”