An Efficient Automated Method of Assigning Students to Capstone Design Projects

Students in ABET accredited engineering programs are required to complete a capstone project before graduation. A common challenge and one faced for industry supported projects at The University of Texas at Austin is optimizing the assignment of students to project teams based on each student’s skills and interests and each project’s overall skill requirements. Forming reasonable teams by hand can require several weeks of manual effort. This paper presents a user-friendly, flexible software application to address this challenge. It allows for rapid optimal or near-optimal team formation, evaluated based on a defined goodness of fit for individual teams and all teams collectively, addressing any number of specified student skills and interests and project requirements. The software application includes three major components: a straightforward user interface, a team allocation algorithm, and a goodness of fit measure for evaluating matches of students with projects. The software application accepts input CSV files and outputs a new CSV file that lists the teams, along with a user interface display of team quality measures. The system may be run locally, ensuring privacy standards, in addition to the option of web-based hosting if desired. The algorithm has an expected runtime of no longer than an hour on typical personal computers. The end objective is for capstone professors around the world to be able to utilize this open-source software to quickly and effectively manage their capstone project team formation, affording more time for project completion. The source code is available on Github (https://github.com/erertertet/CAP25).