Abstract:

The capstone experience for many engineering programs includes the opportunity for students to gain valuable experience in the profession prior to completion of their degree. The Senior Design Program in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) Department at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) provides this experience for undergraduate mechanical engineers. A similar program exists in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department to provide this experience for the undergraduate electrical engineers, computer engineers, and students in the Data Analytics and Systems Engineering program. As with many similar programs, this is accomplished in both the MAE and ECE courses by bringing in external project sponsors with real problems faced by their organizations that the students, functioning on 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. Missing from both programs, however, has been the opportunity to provide students experience working on multidisciplinary teams. While some specific projects have ended up involving students from the different disciplines working together, there was reluctance to integrate the capstone experience across departments, in part because of the different departments’ perspectives on the broader role this experience fulfilled in their curricula, and how that related to the accreditation process, a crucial aspect of undergraduate engineering education in the United States (US). Multidisciplinary design teams are common throughout industry for very good reasons. First and foremost, real problems rarely fit neatly within a discipline-specific box. Also, while engineers trained and educated in a particular field within engineering clearly have some specialized skills and knowledge that they can bring to various technical problems, they also bring different perspectives. Diverse engineering teams inherently offer strong advantages in problem solving, and developing skills to work well in that environment has long been considered an important attribute of engineering programs. Coordinating across academic departments, however, is often an extremely difficult undertaking, and “multidisciplinary teams” can end up being redefined to refer to the variety of subspecialty areas within any of the traditional engineering disciplines. Creating opportunities for the comingling of students from all of the engineering disciplines, however, would provide a unique opportunity for true multidisciplinary team experiences, and in the 2022-23 academic year, the two capstone programs in the College of Engineering and Applied Science at UCCS took the first major step towards full integration. A slate of 24 external customer sponsored projects was assembled, and teams were formed from the combined pool of students from all of the supported engineering degrees of the two departments. This paper will discuss the results of this integration effort, including both the observed benefits realized as well as the challenges that had to be overcome, and will present a template for how such integrated capstone efforts might be formed at other institutions.

Keywords:

Engineering Design, Capstone, Multidisciplinary.