A Capstone Senior Engineering Design Course: A Project Case Study And Its Subsequent History

A senior engineering design course can be used to develop ties with industry while giving students a taste of real-life project engineering. The engineering and technology curricula at Lake Superior State University (LSSU) incorporate a two-semester, multidisciplinary capstone senior design course in which students participate in projects funded by local or regional industries. As such, the university must balance the needs of the funding company with the realities of teaching project engineering to students who may never have been involved in a “real” engineering project before. The funding companies expect and deserve a quality project and the university must provide students with a major design experience subject to realistic constraints that can be monitored and measured. Often, too, the students are more likely to remember and learn from a situation in which things goes wrong instead of a situation in which everything goes well.