2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

STUDENT PEER LECTURE IN CAPSTONE DESIGN PROJECT

ABSTRACT
The senior Capstone project course in our mechanical engineering program is a two-semester course, in which the first semester is focused on paper design and the second semester is focused on constructing and testing the prototypes. For each semester of this course, there are two informal presentations and one final formal presentation. These presentations are typically status reports or result reports. Topics of the capstone design projects are student-selected and faculty-approved projects or some industry-sponsored projects. All of these projects are open-end design projects. Typically, students implement what they have learned through the curriculum and also need to self-learn some additional knowledge or skills for their projects. These are specific to their projects and are not discussed in their common courses. These might be also useful to other students. However, students typically don’t have time to talk about this additional knowledge and skills in their presentations, which are typically 15 to 20 minutes status reports. To promote active learning and activate class activities, we created a new activity-peer lecture in the capstone design project for sharing this additional knowledge and skills. The primary object of this peer lecture is to promote and share their self-learning knowledge and skills. The duration of a peer lecture could be between 30 minutes to a maximum of 100 minutes. After they complete the paper design of their capstone design projects in the first semester, student design teams will discuss with faculty advisors to select peer lecture topics. Then, student design teams will use the first three weeks of the second semester to prepare the peer lecture and then deliver it during weeks 4 to 6 of the second semester. The direct feedback from students was that they liked peer lectures and said that they got a much deep understanding of the selected topic due to their preparation and lecturing. They also learned some useful information and skills from other peer lectures. We have implemented students' peer lectures in the last three years. This paper will present how to develop and implement student peer lectures and our experiences in the last three years. This paper will also display and discuss the class survey results about students' peer lecturing.