2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Over the last six years, we have developed and refined our approach to teaching a second-year cornerstone course in electrical and computer engineering. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of this cornerstone course on our senior capstone students.
We developed the cornerstone course because:
a) students did not have sufficient preparation for a demanding fourth-year capstone project, and
b) students need to repeatedly practice complex tasks such as teamwork, project management, and communication.
The cornerstone sequence consists of two classes; the first focused on design processes, and the second focused on project implementation. These classes have two overarching goals:
1. Teach students engineering design and project management well before the fourth-year capstone projects.
2. Teach electrical and computer engineering topics through hands-on experiential learning.
For course assessment we have developed rubrics that were applied to several of the ABET and related student learning outcomes. A similar set of rubrics is used in the assessment of capstone projects. In the full paper we will examine student performance:
a) in their sophomore cornerstone course vs. senior capstone course, and
b) in their senior capstone course before and after introduction of the cornerstone course.
In this paper, we will focus on ABET outcome 5 (Teamwork and Project Management). To get a sense of how students evaluate the impact of the cornerstone course on their preparedness for capstone projects, we will develop a survey and report on the results.
Our hypotheses are:
a) students will show improvement from the sophomore to the senior course due to increased experience, and
b) students will perform better in their capstone course since we introduced the cornerstone course.
In the full paper we will provide the analysis of this data, what conclusions can be drawn, if our hypotheses are supported, and potential future improvements.