2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Starting in Fall 2024, we experimented with a new variation of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Capstone course at ANONYMIZED University by embedding 3rd year Product Design students into select capstone teams which had a mechanical design component. The Electrical and Computer Engineering Course is a two-semester course in which teams work on industry sponsored projects, faculty sponsored projects, or competitions. The teams are required to produce a working physical prototype required by the end of second semester. We are not aware of other capstone courses which have included product design and electrical and computer engineering students on multidisciplinary teams, as most multidisciplinary capstone experiences include multiple engineering majors only. In the 2024-25 school year, we began with seven capstone teams which included product design students, and in fall 2025, we began with five. Not all teams in the capstone course included product design students, some only included electrical and computer engineering students.

In this paper, we report on our findings regarding the success of the multidisciplinary teams’ collaboration. We have assessed the success of the collaboration in two ways, one, by analyzing student responses to teammate evaluations, and two, by analyzing how many teams opted to stay together into the second semester, when continuing the collaboration was optional for the product design students. Students completed confidential teammate evaluations approximately every four weeks throughout the two semesters of the capstone project. The teammate evaluations required the students to make comments about each individual team member’s contributions and assign a percentage to indicate how much project work was done by each team member. The evaluations also required students to rate each team member on different criteria such as showing up to meetings consistently, having a good attitude, etc.

The initial results of the first year of the collaboration were promising, as six of the seven teams opted to stay together for the second semester of the collaboration. The multidisciplinary teams also produced more complete prototypes than in years prior. Our analysis of teammate evaluation scores and comments is still in progress at the time of writing this abstract, but our full paper submission will present the full results from the 2024-25 school year, as well as some initial findings from the 2025-26 school year.