Education Commons^™

A Semi-Automatic Approach For Project Assignment In A Capstone Course, Mark Chang, Allen Downey

Mark L. Chang

This paper presents a semi-automatic approach to assigning students to project teams for a year-long, industry-sponsored senior capstone course. Successful assignment requires knowl- edge of at least individual project requirements, student skills, student personalities, and student project preferences. This mix of hard skills, soft skills, and interpersonal impres- sions requires human involvement to produce a high-quality assignment. The importance of faculty input often requires that the assignment process be labor- and time-intensive.

Our approach attempts to reduce the time required to perform this assignment by selectively automating parts of the task flow. An automated search uses a randomized greedy algorithm …

A Blank Slate: Creating A New Senior Engineering Capstone Experience, Mark L. Chang, Jessica Townsend

Mark L. Chang

This paper presents some of the challenges, successes, and experiences in designing a new senior engineering capstone program at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. Senior capstone design programs in engineering colleges have evolved over many years and are often modified and reinvented to keep up with the needs of both students and external constituencies. Harvey Mudd College’s Clinic program is one of the largest and longest-running capstone programs in the country that relies heavily on industry sponsors to provide real world problems and funding to execute the projects. For many reasons, and in no small way because of …

Work In Progress - Impact Of Early Design Instruction On Capstone Experiences, Mark L. Chang, Jessica Townsend

Mark L. Chang

In the Olin College curriculum, students have significant, early, and continuous exposure to user-oriented design principles. As a result, our students have a very user-centered approach to problem solving that has affected our yearlong, industry-sponsored capstone in several ways. We have reflected on five years of capstone engagements in order to learn how our program has changed because of the design emphasis in our curriculum. The significance of our work is to inform the many departments that are already undertaking design-centric curriculum reform on how they may modify their capstone experiences to best take advantage of new student understanding, and …