{"doi":"10.18260/1-2--21866","title":"Reflections on Teaching a Consolidated Capstone Design Course to a Mixed Student Body","abstract":"Abstract Reflections on Teaching a Consolidated Capstone Design Course to a Mixed Student BodyIn the last several years, under the intense financial pressure more courses have beenconsolidated to reduce the cost. Sometimes even similar courses offered at different departmentswere consolidated. The down side of this trend is that the departments may lose the full controlof the consolidated courses. The up side of this trend, however, is that such consolidations canpotentially open the doors for more interdisciplinary collaboration opportunities. At ouruniversity, originally four departments offered Capstone courses to four undergraduate majors,including engineering physics (EP), computer science (CS), computer information systems(CIS), and global studies (GS). Starting Spring 2010, all these capstone courses have beenconsolidated into one course that is offered to all seniors student from the above majors. Thecourse has been offered twice (Spring 2010 and Spring 2011), and this article presents ourreflections on teaching such a course.To let each department maintain partial control of the course and to deliver the necessarytechnical/disciplinary content, the course is team taught by faculty members from eachdepartment. A primary instructor is selected to facilitate and coordinate the teaching process.The three credit-hour capstone design course meets three times a week, one hour each time.Among the three hours each week, one hour is the common meeting time, and contents commonto all majors are delivered. In the other two hours each faculty member meets with their studentteams to focus on the design projects. The topics covered in the common content include designprocess, project management, ethics, and most importantly, oral presentations from the studentsabout their specific design projects. At the end of the semester, a peer-evaluation of all thedesign projects is performed.Most design teams consist of students from the same major; however, we have had a few teamsconsisting of students from different backgrounds. We also have had teams of different sizes,ranging from two persons to five persons. Our experience has indicated that three- or four-person is probably the optimum size for the capstone design team: you don’t have groupdynamics if you have less than three persons in a team, while a team consisting of more than fourpeople becomes very difficult to manage. To instill the importance of team work, the student’sgrade is heavily based on the performance of their team. Each team gives four oral presentationson different aspects of their projects, a presentation on ethics, and several written reports on theirdesign. The oral presentations are peer evaluated by all the students. Because we have a mixedstudent body, this has enforced the students to learn how to present their ideas to “outsiders” andforce them to practice their communication skills.The course has been generally well-received by all the students. Most of them realize theimportance of the “soft” skills, particularly the skill of how to communicate with people fromdifferent backgrounds. The exposure to a wide variety of design projects, however, has apolarizing effect: some students become interested in other majors while others withdraw andbecome detached.","journal":"Papers on Engineering Education Repository (American Society for Engineering Education)","year":2020,"id":128596,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9549,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":579916,"name":"Santaneel Ghosh","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":579917,"name":"Ken Surendran","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":361601,"name":"Jian Peng","orcid":"0000-0001-8859-6168","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":9,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:15:42.522809Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}