Expanding and improving the integration of multidisciplinary projects in a capstone senior design course: Experience gained and future plans

Abstract

Over the last several years, the multidisciplinary capstone Senior Design Project program implemented by the departments of Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering has continued to expand and improve, in terms of the number of multidisciplinary, interdepartmental project teams, the degree of coordination between different departments, the rigor of the structured engineering design process, and the excellence of the project outcomes. Important features of our interdepartmental Senior Design program include: (1) a twosemester structured engineering design sequence, with regular design-review checkpoints at which students receive feedback on their written reports, oral presentations and demonstrations from multidisciplinary groups of faculty reviewers; (2) the inclusion of many projects sponsored by external clients/customers, including established industrial firms, new entrepreneurial ventures, and research institutions (both government agencies/labs and academic science departments); (3) international collaborations through student exchange programs and partnerships with foreign universities in several countries; (4) ongoing participation in regional, national, and international engineering design competitions. Several new milestones in the evolution of our program have been attained in recent years, including a first-place victory in a regional design competition (SoutheastCon), the success of several of our industry-sponsored teams in developing viable commercializable products, the development of several international exchange partnerships, and the expansion of our multidisciplinary program to include students from an increasing number of different departments, with several students from the Civil and Environmental Engineering and Computer Science departments newly participating on our multidisciplinary teams this year. In this paper, we review the development and present structure of our multidisciplinary program, discuss some of the administrative challenges faced and lessons learned in the course of our interdepartmental collaboration, and present our vision for making this program even more successful and well-integrated in the future, through enhancements such as improved synchronization of schedules and standardization of assignment requirements between departments. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2014.

Publication Title

ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings

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