A new full year multidisciplinary engineering senior design project course: Structure, content and lessons learned

Abstract

A new full-year multidisciplinary senior design project course has been implemented at California Polytechnic State University. This course series utilizes externally sponsored comprehensive design projects to provide a hands-on and classroom environment in which students learn and apply the design process and systems engineering. The objective is to provide a realistic environment that enhances the cognitive learning of the students. The course also gives them a chance to apply the fundamental principles of science, engineering and mathematics towards the solution to technical problems that impact society and an appreciation of the strength of the multidisciplinary approach to solving these problems. This course brought students together from six of the college's engineering disciplines to tackle problems requiring multi-disciplinary talents. Over the course of the academic year, multi-disciplinary teams designed, built, and tested solutions to externally provided problems. The class lasted three quarters (approx: 30 weeks), and during the three quarters, student teams of four to six students designed, produced and tested prototype hardware for the external sponsors. The first quarter of the course focused on team building, problem definition and conceptual design. This included a serious look at defining the engineering problem to be solved as well as an exploration of the student's full creative potential in generating solutions. By the end of the first quarter, the students produced a conceptual design and layout for their sponsor's review and approval. During the first part of the second quarter the students performed detail design work including supporting analysis, a formal design report and a complete set engineering drawings and schematics. The second part of the quarter focused on procurement and fabrication. The last quarter had the students building, testing and documenting a prototype. The prototype and a comprehensive final report, including test results were presented to the project sponsors at our annual Design Expo. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2010.