2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In multidisciplinary engineering capstone courses, students of a variety of disciplines work in teams to complete design projects. Examples of project sources include problems assigned by the instructor, suggested by other faculty, sponsored by industry, proposed by the students and any combination of these. This study stems from a well-established capstone design program where students work in multidisciplinary teams for two semesters in designing, building and testing projects from industry sponsors. Therefore, students traditionally join the program for an opportunity to work on real-world engineering problems along with experienced industry engineers, who are also potential employers. Recently, this program has included as project sources, faculty research projects and funded service-learning, henceforth respectively named, internal projects and service-learning projects. Accordingly, internal and service-learning projects need to be measured up against industry sponsored projects to determine interest, performance, and satisfaction are maintained for every project. Therefore, the three research questions for this study are (1) In a well-known industry sponsored projects program, will students be equally interested in applying to service-learning and internal projects? (2) Is student and team performance impacted by the project source? (3) Do service-learning and internal projects meet student satisfaction regarding program outcomes? This study investigates the most recent three years of the program to determine if students are equally interested in the internal or service-learning sponsored projects compared to industry sponsored projects, and if student and team performance and satisfaction, is similar between the three project sources. Student interest is measured using student project rankings which they complete for project placement after viewing a pitch presentation by the project faculty. Student and team performance and satisfaction are measured using peer and self-evaluations, faculty evaluations and grades, and student evaluations of the program. Finding the relationship between project source and initial student interest in projects allows for determining potential need for improving the project pitch process by creating methods for ensuring students understand the importance and benefits of each project source type. Determining the impact of project source on student and team performance and satisfaction, may suggest if gaps exist between projects from different sources, and lead to creating measures for ensuring students in each project source have the same educational experience. The results of this study could help other project design courses manage multiple project sources based on students’ and sponsors' best interests and expected project outcomes.