2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The capstone design course is a core pre-graduation requirement in today’s engineering degree, expected by accreditation bodies, employers and students alike. This monolithic requirement hides a wide variety of capstone types, however, in terms of team size, disciplinary mix, course duration and intensity, stakeholder engagements, funding, grading emphasis, and expected design and project management approaches, amongst others.

Having been involved in teaching a variety of capstones over the past decade, the authors propose a capstone classification in this paper, to make it easier to compare capstone courses. The goal of this classification is to help improve and connect capstones, and make it easier to compare best practices in different capstone course types. This paper builds upon previous work that proposed a standardized way to classify capstone courses, by providing some text and context behind the classification, with the goal of testing out these capstone classification descriptions with conference attendees and other stakeholders. With confirmation or adjustment based on conference feedback, this capstone classification will be available for use by the capstone community, which will facilitate exchange between capstone practitioners, and support future Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) work into capstones by providing a common language to compare these complex courses.