Web-based Tools For Supporting Student-driven Capstone Design Team Formation

Abstract

Jariwala has over nine years of research experience in modeling, simulation, engineering design, and manufacturing process development, with research focus on design of polymer based micro additive manufacturing process. During his Ph.D. studies, he was also a participant of the innovative TI:GER R program (funded by NSF:IGERT), which prepares students to commercialize high impact scientific research results. Dr. Jariwala has participated and led several research projects from funded by NSF, the State of Georgia and Industry sponsors. At Georgia Tech, he is responsible for enhancing corporate support for design courses, managing design and fabrication/prototyping facilities, coordinating the design competitions/expo and teaching design courses, with a strong focus on creating and enabling multidisciplinary educational experiences. AbstractTeam formation for Capstone Design projects is a complex challenge due to the many parameters involved, many of which are intangible. Of all the challenges in organizing a Capstone Design course, team formation is considered the primary one due to its importance in facilitating synergistic partnerships for successful completion of the Capstone project. The authors propose a process for facilitating team creation in an organic fashion amongst students by collecting and providing information about student interest on a per project basis as well as on each student's skills. This allows students to gauge the interest levels of potential teammates for projects they are interested in as well and choose teammates that have complementary skills, thus maximizing their potential for success. To measure the efficacy of this system, post-process data analytics was utilized to gauge the utility of the proposed method to help form student teams. Findings from these analyses are discussed along with opportunities for future improvements.

Multidisciplinary Engineering Capstone Design: Successful Implementation at a Regional Hispanic-Serving Institution

“…Both [4] and [9] report using online tools to allow students to join or explore project teams. A similar strategy was adopted in the current work through the use of online discussion boards, but, given the small enrollment in the senior design courses, teams and projects were largely developed through class discussion.…”

Peer Mentorship Model to Enhance Design Engineering Education

“…Teamwork is critical to the success of the projects. So a dedicated custom software solution was built to allow students to optimize common project interests and complementary skills as proposed in previous literature [12], [13]. The entire course is split into three five-week sprints with an interim report and presentation requirement at the end of each sprint.…”

A Hybrid Approach to Team-forming for Capstone Design Projects

“…[1] for review), including random assignment, self-selection, and instructor assignment. In a large course (e.g., 50 projects and 160 students), the process of forming teams is particularly challenging [2]. There are some algorithms (www.catme.org) that have been developed to try to improve this process by considering a specified set of parameters [3], but these processes leave students with minimal agency in the final decision.…”