Using Open Source Software to Prepare Students for Senior Design

This paper deals with the complication and use of engineering software during a student's capstone design course.Often, students are simply pointed to the computer and told to use engineering software to analyze their designs.As a result, some interesting and outlandish simulations are presented in support of their designs.As is often the case, there is very little benchmarking, verification or analytical/critical thinking of their simulations.This paper will describe one method that can be used to help remediate this problem.