2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Capstone engineering design projects aim to synthesize four years of college education into an authentic / context-based engineering design experience wherein student design teams work to balance objectives with constraints to produce a design that meets clients’ needs. Assigning complex engineering design projects prior to the senior year can feel daunting because students haven’t learned the technical engineering that they must apply to produce successful designs. But the engineering design process doesn’t require the application of complex mathematical, scientific, or engineering theory; it can be taught, and students can apply it as early as their freshman year.

This paper will describe a framework for incorporating a context-based engineering design project into a first-year engineering curriculum. The project is part of a one credit course, first offered in spring 2022, and required for all undergraduate students in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. For the first three years of the course, students worked through the engineering design process as they collaborated in teams to develop proposals for vacant city lots. Community partners who had volunteered to steward the lots acted as the project clients, and at the end of the semester students presented their proposals to the community partners. In addition to presenting their work, students developed scaled drawings, cost estimates, and a list of potential funding sources for their clients. Incorporated as part of a larger curriculum redesign, there were three objectives for the course: (1) to improve students’ design thinking skills, (2) to attract and retain students to the program, and (3) to engage students with the community in their adopted city.

Though the course enrollment has grown from 5 (2022) to 8 (2023 and 2024) to 14 students (2025), the relatively small numbers mean that formal data was not collected during the first three years the course was offered; rather, we’ve iterated the course design based on informal observations made each year by the course faculty. These iterations, observations, and future research questions will be discussed in this paper.