Collaborative Senior Design Capstone at Two Geographically Separated Universities

As remote engineering collaboration increases in popularity due to the proliferation of networking tools and the expansion of telework opportunities resulting from the shutdowns of COVID-19, the need to study their efficacy grows. This work examines a collaboration conducted between two geographically separated universities to complete a mechanical engineering design experience. While such an experience may be rare within academic design courses, it undoubtedly reflects the reality of engineering teams in industry and government that are comprised of geographically separated teams. Three teams of students, that each included students from both schools, worked for an academic year to complete three unique capstone projects, with three different advisors. The students were provided various computer-based collaboration tools and encouraged to use them throughout. This work examines their experiences to investigate successes and potential improvements during each design phase, to include consideration of how the provided tools enabled or hindered remote collaboration. Additionally, this work surveyed project sponsors to determine how the remote collaboration teams' performance compared to previous years of collocated teams. Survey data were collected following three significant milestones during the design efforts: preliminary design review (PDR), critical design review (CDR), and the final briefing. Results show that the geographically separated teams performed equivalently to collocated teams, though they encountered challenges during the prototyping and testing design activities.