2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Over the last five years, we have initiated, implemented, and refined our approach to teaching sophomore-level cornerstone courses. The original impetus for the development of these courses was the realization that students did not have sufficient preparation for demanding capstone projects and that waiting for the senior year to fix the deficiencies was not effective. While there are introductory level project-based courses in the first year, students do not have enough technical background to make the projects technically challenging. While they may get some teamwork experience from such courses, they usually only get very basic, if any, training in project management. This is why we decided to introduce our cornerstone courses in the sophomore year. We developed a two-quarter-long course sequence: one focused on design processes and another on project implementation. We had two overarching goals:
1. Teach students design and project development well before senior Capstone projects.
2. Integrate various strands of electrical and computer engineering through experiential learning.
Given their project-based nature, these courses are a natural fit for the assessment of many of the student outcomes listed by ABET. We have developed a series of assessment tools, primarily in the form of rubrics. These rubrics are generalizable and can be applied in other courses, especially project-based ones. We paid special attention to some of the so-called “professional skills”: teamwork, project management, ethics, life-long learning, and communication.
In the full paper, we will describe each of the assessment tools, their deployment, examples of analysis, and how this analysis was eventually used in ABET assessment. These tools have changed over the years, and Covid makes historical comparisons difficult. However, with the return of in-class instruction, we are now collecting data and can identify potential problems in student learning. We have also developed detailed course information describing assessment and other organizational issues arising in this and similar courses. We believe this documentation will be useful to any potential future adopters. We will discuss this documentation in the full paper as well.