2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The senior capstone design experience plays a crucial role in undergraduate engineering education, offering students a valuable opportunity to bridge the gap between theory and real-world practice. Typically spanning a year, this team-based challenge allows students to apply their knowledge to a comprehensive engineering design project. In traditional disciplines like mechanical or electrical engineering, students often engage in industry-sponsored projects that are carefully scoped to provide both a rewarding educational experience and tangible value to industry partners. However, for interdisciplinary fields such as mechatronics engineering, finding industry projects that fully capture the essence of a mechatronics capstone project can be more difficult. This paper presents a two-course senior capstone design sequence at [institution], specifically tailored for undergraduate mechatronics engineering students. It outlines two distinct approaches employed at [institution] to enhance the capstone experience for mechatronics engineering majors. The first approach features faculty-driven design projects, where professors independently define the problem statement, scope, and design criteria, and assign team members, with no input from students. The second approach emphasizes student-driven projects, where students form teams themselves and collaborate closely with faculty to co-create the design challenge, identify the problem, and establish appropriate design constraints. The strengths and weaknesses of both approaches are compared, and sample projects are provided, along with general student feedback and faculty observations. The authors aim to share insights and lessons learned at [institution] that may benefit faculty at other institutions tasked with developing capstone course sequences for mechatronics engineering majors. Additionally, the approaches discussed in this paper can be adapted for traditional mechanical or electrical engineering programs, particularly for students with a strong interest in mechatronics, robotics, and interdisciplinary applications.