Capstone design landscape review: Structures and elements

Capstone courses in engineering education represent the culmination of students' learning and serve as a pivotal step in their transition into the industry. The diversity of capstone experiences is nevertheless quite large. This paper provides a starting point for qualifying and quantifying this. It is not a critique of capstone approaches, but rather a survey of possible choices. These include the level of design vs. development work, the nature of supervision and support, the focus on engineering project processes vs. deliverables, the multi- or mono-disciplinarity of the projects, etc. By capturing and describing these, this paper will help schools articulate the purpose of capstones in their specific context(s). Providing the language to describe the current capstone landscape can then also inform future work to compare, evaluate and evolve our capstones to better address the needs of our students, industry and society at large.