Industrial-Style, Multi-Disciplined Senior Project

Capstone project courses are essential platforms for students in general and engineering disciplines in particular.These projects are used to build up students' required professional skills and prepare them for their future careers in a highly competitive global market.Programs curriculum are being reviewed, upgraded, and enhanced continuously to meet current and future requirements of engineering careers.Industry is rapidly leaning towards a project management approach for conducting business and improvements.It is crucial to embed the practice of real-world project management teams in the structure of the capstone project courses.This paper aims to study and analyze a model of capstone projects, the senior project course.Students from at least three different engineering technology programs are teamed up to work together in an innovative way to brainstorm, suggest and choose a project.Furthermore, teams work together through the process of creating a commercial product.The teams in this course will also create a complete project document that includes the patent search process, market survey analysis, design, product testing, and commercialization plans.This documentation is an excellent opportunity for team members to actively interact with multiple discipline members and to practice industrial-style project management.Collected data on this experience will help to comprehend the benefits of this professional training and the actions needed to improve it.By design, this course creates industrial-like environment of work preparing the students to be able to discuss different aspects of a project and learn to work with team members having different backgrounds.The paper demonstrates the pedagogical methodology applied in the class that mirrors industrial environment rather than traditional class-setting practice.A comparison between multi-disciplined teams and single-disciplined teams is conducted in this paper.Data will be collected from surveys to highlight major lessons learned and the set of skills students gained by working with team members from other programs.The paper also assesses the efficiency of the course through analyzing course assessment data.