A manufacturing engineering capstone design course: Moving with the real world

Abstract

A capstone course in manufacturing engineering has been offered to undergraduates majoring in manufacturing engineering at Texas State University for four years. In this course students experience all aspects of the design/development cycle: product design, prototyping/verification, manufacturability analysis, and the manufacturing design of the product. This course has been continuously updated to offer the latest tools, software, and teaching and evaluation techniques. Students are assigned to teams based on their learning style, technical and academic background, and schedule. Students must complete an industry-supported project. In this course, students are evaluated both individually through performance on homework, quizzes, and exams; and also as team members on the basis of a design and prototype review, final report, presentation, peer evaluation, and comments by a panel of experts. Course assessment is based upon a variety of surveys and feedback mechanisms. This paper describes several of this year's projects. The overall conclusion, on the basis of these projects, is that the outcome of this course has been satisfactory in all aspects. This success is due to appropriate project, sponsor support, students' efforts, faculty performance, departmental support, and the feedback from the panel of experts. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2007.