2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In our Faculty of Engineering, we define Major Capstone Design Projects (MCDP) as open-ended design projects, from project identification to fully functional prototype fabrication and testing, involving large teams of students, normally from six to eight, and accounting for 12 credits out of 120-credit programs. The Department of Mechanical Engineering (ME) and the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) and Computer Engineering (CE) have been offering MCDP courses for about 30 years. The scope of the projects in both departments frequently overlapped disciplinary boundaries, and students either had to acquire on their own knowledge and skills missing in their training, or to find ways to collaborate with teams from the other department, which revealed to be difficult.

As a solution, the launch of the Robotics Engineering (RE) program in 2017 provided an opportunity to unify the MCDP courses for all programs. Put in place in the Summer 2020, multidisciplinary MCDP (M-MCDP) consists of three courses distributed over the last three semesters of the ME, EE, CE and RE curricula. M-MCDP involves an open call for project ideas, multidisciplinary assessments of these project ideas by groups of students, three courses over the last three semesters of their undergraduate curricula, multidisciplinary team teaching, and skill-based evaluations. Having the opportunity to combine their expertise with other engineering fields creates for students a real teamwork learning experience that enhances their preparation for their future professional practice. Graduating the fourth M-MCDP cohort in December 2024, the paper presents the benefits and impacts on graduates’ engineering career, as well as the limitations and areas for improvements, gathered from surveys of alumni and graduating students. Being involved in large-scale, real, and complete multidisciplinary design projects that they manage independently allows students to develop not only their technical skills but also their project management and professional abilities. The Public Expo also stands out as a significant strength. The main challenges include ensuring uniformity in team teaching, addressing organizational issues in open-ended projects, and managing coordination and training across multiple programs.