Experiences and outcomes of teaching senior capstone course

Abstract

The author taught a senor capstone design course during Fall 2017 in the Mechanical Systems design stream at Kettering University. The course duration for this course is approximately 11 weeks (Quarter system) that posed several challenges for handling the classes due to shorter academic term. The students are expected to perform detailed analysis and also validate the proof of concept of their designs by building prototypes. In all, there were 5 teams with 4 students each in each team. This paper discusses the course organization, topical selection policies and the final choice of a topic selected for each group to work on. Also, the appropriate assessment methods used to monitor weekly progress made by each group will be discussed. Finally, a brief description of work carried in each project along with the results from a sample project will be discussed.