Improving the Aerospace Capstone Design Experience Through Simulation Based Learning

A key role of universities is to prepare students to work in their chosen profession upon completion of their degree program.Engineering capstone design courses are often the only required courses that challenge students to draw on nearly all of thestudents’ previous collegiate learning experiences and to synthesize and apply these to creating a new solution to an engineeringproblem. Aside from internship and co-op experiences, these are often the first courses that expose engineering students to some ofthe technical and political issues that they will often face in their professional engineering careers. Industry often looks at thesedesign experiences in addition to work experience when evaluating new graduates. While beneficial, there remains a perceiveddisconnect between what academia is producing and what industry is seeking. Industry is seeking ‘engineers’ who are well versed inthe application of science to problem solving whereas academia is producing ‘engineer scientists’ who are well versed in the science,but lacking in the application of knowledge gained through experience. While some context-based learning opportunities areemerging much earlier in the engineering curriculum, the needs and means to provide such experiences remain limited. This paperdiscusses a pilot study that was conducted during the first term of a two term capstone design class in aerospace engineeringaircraft design at Virginia Tech. The study explored the educational impact of utilizing realism and simulation to introduce theaircraft design process with the aim of determining if such an approach could help remedy the academia/industry disconnect and at the same time make for an engaging design experience for the students. Results indicate that the use of simulation was welcomedby the participants of the study and can help prepare students to think as working design professionals, not limited by the genericdesign solutions often found in academic de-contextualized design problems.

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