A CDIO Approach to the Final Year Capstone Project

The principles and standards of CDIO are being implemented in the MEng programme in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at Queen’s University Belfast. As part of the implementation plan the final year of the programme has been modified in order to provide an integrated learning experience centred on a new team-based project. The changes to the programme are described and examples are presented to illustrate the type of project carried out by the student teams. Finally the new project’s role in helping to meet the CDIO Standards is discussed, conclusions are drawn and future work is outlined. INTRODUCTION The School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at Queen’s University Belfast has a number of established engineering programmes, to which it has recently added a new programme in Product Design and Development. As a participant in the CDIO Initiative the School aims to adopt CDIO in all of its programmes. In the case of the new programme the opportunity has been taken to implement CDIO in a comprehensive manner in the first year, and this will be repeated in subsequent years as the first cohort of students progresses through the programme. In the case of the established programmes the adoption of CDIO has inevitably posed additional difficulties, but an implementation plan is being followed that will introduce the necessary changes over the next few years. The reference point for the CDIO implementation plan is the twelve CDIO Standards. In terms of planning the curriculum the Standards require an introductory course that incorporates design-build experiences, followed by at least one further design-build exercise of a more advanced and demanding nature. The Standards also stipulate that the curriculum should address the CDIO Syllabus which covers a wide range of personal, interpersonal and product and system building skills. Furthermore the development of these skills should be integrated with the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge and, where appropriate, disciplinary subjects should be linked together in a meaningful way. Within individual courses the Standards require an emphasis on active and experiential learning, and that every opportunity should be sought to develop students’ skills simultaneously with the teaching of disciplinary topics. The School’s implementation plan for its established programmes covers all of the above requirements, and progress is being made with all aspects of the plan. However the initial focus of the plan was the project undertaken in the final year of the School’s MEng programme in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. As discussed in the remainder of the paper, this