Factors that Inhibit or Enable Success of Capstone Design Teams

Engineering capstone is considered the final and crowning design course in the engineering curriculum.A typical design team is made up with three to five students and is multidisciplinary in nature.These teams are assembled either by project choice where a member is assigned to a project, or by group choice where a project is chosen by an existing self-forming group.A selfforming group is characteristically a group of friends that clumped together during their educational career.No matter how the team was formed, being part of the same team for a yearlong project creates interesting team dynamics, be it positive or negative.However, team dynamics alone is not purely indicative of a group's success or failure.This paper looks at the individual responses of two questions asked at the end of the senior capstone experience.The first, 'Identify factors that inhibit the group in its functioning', examines how team friction, advisors, university resources, and other factors restrain the success of a capstone design team.The second question, 'Indentify factors that enable the group to function well', explores the events and personalities that create a positive or success project.Eighty-eight replies taken over two years are compared with overall grade, gender, and project type revealing factors of success and failure in senior capstone design.Overall 52.6% of all students and 95% of female students indicated that conflicts in schedule was the number one inhibiting factor in their projects success, whereas teamwork, 70.5% overall, was the leading factor in success.