2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The capstone design course is an essential milestone of engineering education and has been used to help fulfill ABET Criteria for Accreditation. Engineering and technology programs have used the capstone course for various purposes, including equipping students with project management skills, assisting students with a teamwork spirit, addressing real-world problems, and as an assessment tool to meet professional accreditation requirements. Although the process for implementing capstone projects varies between programs, such projects normally take two semesters to complete and, in most cases, students are organized in teams of two or more.
Both the electrical engineering and electrical engineering technology programs at Penn State Harrisburg have two-course sequences that constitute the capstone design experience. In the first course, student teams learn about the formal engineering design process and project management. This training process includes but is not limited to topic selection, background research, engineering and customer requirements generation, etc. Then, a detailed proposal is developed to be implemented in the following semester. The capstone sequence is structured to cover several critical non-technical issues, like incorporating engineering standards and including realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, manufacturability, and safety. The final report is a major outcome of the course and is expected to fully describe the project initiation, development, analysis, design, and verification phases. Other expectations include: Each team maintains a laboratory notebook that documents the day-to-day activities of the project, attends review meetings with the instructor and their technical advisor throughout the semester and submits a draft copy of the final report.
Over the years, students from both electrical engineering and electrical engineering technology have worked in teams to complete their capstone projects. While electrical engineering students may have a strong theoretical background, electrical engineering technology students have strong hands-on experience, an important skill for building and troubleshooting electronic systems. Thus, the collaboration of electrical engineering and electrical engineering technology students can usually deliver projects efficiently and effectively. Another aspect that is worth mentioning here is that some of the projects are industry-sponsored and require multi-disciplinary teams that involve students from other disciplines, such as mechanical engineering or computer science.
The paper will provide details about our approach in coordinating the activities in the two-course capstone design sequence, share information about the supervision and evaluation of student teams, evaluation results based on feedback from faculty advisors, and student self-assessment and feedback through an “after-action-review” form that students complete at the end of the semester.