2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Students working on design and build engineering capstone design projects can encounter safety hazards of various types and severities. In our program, students receive classroom instruction on how to design prototypes that operate safely. To ensure that students understand how to work safely in the capstone studio, all students are required to complete a series of online training modules. However, we recognized that this training does not address all the hazards that students might encounter as they work on their capstone project. The hazards present during the design phase or during prototype construction and testing are often temporary and are not associated with the operation of the prototype itself. It can also be difficult for instructors to have a thorough understanding of what safety hazards are present in all projects, especially in a large program with many teams working on a diverse range of projects.

This paper describes the capstone design project safety process that we developed at our university to address these challenges. This process supplements our existing training with two new deliverables focused on safety. The first is a checklist that is introduced early in the capstone course to make students aware of potential hazards and what types of work are prohibited without prior instructor approval. Later, after teams have finalized their designs on paper, they are required to complete a written Project Hazard Assessment (PHA). We explain how these processes are implemented and share lessons learned from their use in recent years. This process has helped to identify many safety hazards and we have been able to ensure that teams have plans in place to manage these hazards. Since implementation, we have not experienced a safety-related incident.