Abstract:

The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) has long recognized the importance of developing in its graduates the ability to address problems that do not fit neatly into a discipline-specific “box” that tends to be defined for the purposes of encapsulating the content of an undergraduate engineering student’s course of study. Additionally recognized is the importance of developing the “soft skills” necessary to succeed professionally, including both written and verbal communication, team skills, planning and project management, etc. These are the critical skills necessary to put their engineering knowledge to work productively, and while not ignored by engineering curricula per se, the development of these skills tends to be more effectively realized through experience rather than classroom work or traditional assignments, the bread and butter of undergraduate assessment. For many years, the Senior Design Program in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department has endeavored to provide an opportunity for students to begin their transition from engineering student to productive, practicing engineer through its year-long capstone design program. As with many engineering capstone programs, this is accomplished by bringing in external project sponsors with real problems faced by their organizations that the students, functioning in small teams, address over the span of a full academic year. Most of the project sponsors are for-profit companies, with many of those being engineering companies of some sort. This has proven to be a particularly effective model, and has proven very scalable as the program has grown over the years. It is also recognized that in the changing global economy with its many multinational corporations, international collaborative engineering teams have become ubiquitous. These collaborations bring with them many complications beyond those experienced in regionally (or nationally) isolated teams, including remote coordination, cultural, and language issues, to name only a few. As a means to provide a unique opportunity for some UCCS engineering students to experience and begin developing some proficiency in working on such teams when they enter industry, the UCCS Senior Design program staff reached out to colleagues at Linkoping University (LiU) in Sweden to propose a collaborative project. Students from both universities teamed to address a problem brought to them by a Swedish company. There were many educational objectives anticipated from this collaboration, but there were also many complications that had to be addressed. In the end, the collaboration was a tremendous success, from the perspective of both academic programs, from the perspective of the sponsor company, and from the perspectives of the students. This paper details this collaborative project, provides insights into the logistical issues at both academic institutions and how they were managed, and lays out a model to be considered elsewhere for similar collaborative arrangements. Lessons learned and future plans are also shared.

Keywords:

International Projects, Capstone Design, Engineering Design.