The capstone course: everyone has heard tales about it, and no other family of courses in the College of Engineering breeds a more concentrated mixture of curiosity and apprehension. For many students, the senior design or “capstone” course is a requirement that looms large over the curriculum, a mysterious gatekeeper standing watch over their diploma. However, the capstone course is a class striving to be more than a dreaded requirement. Students who challenge it and overcome it, report themselves far better off from the experience. Professor Willis J. Tompkins, associate chair of the biomedical engineering department says, “A lot of the stuff [students] learn in this course can’t be found in a textbook. They have to go find the answers themselves somewhere out there.”
Members of the Water-Wagon group present their mobile water purification device that purifies water via a pump run by the movement of the cart.
Photo Credit: Danny MarchewkaBut what is the capstone project? What purpose does it serve, other than eating up the lives of engineering students? Tompkins says, “We are trying to demonstrate that engineering is lifelong learning.” As the name suggests, the senior design project is a course traditionally taken by seniors that involves selecting a topic and working in a group to design a device, product or system around that topic. The projects and the specifics of the courses, however, tend to vary dramatically from field to field.
Kim Manner, senior lecturer in mechanical engineering and instructor of the ME senior design class, encourages his students to “fix a problem.” Students in his class are supplied with a list of possible engineering problems to solve, but are given a great deal of freedom in selecting their topic. They are advised to match their interests and skills to a project that they are passionate about. One of the groups in Manner’s class constructed a basic utility vehicle for use in disaster relief, an endeavor the students say the recent earthquake in Haiti inspired them to undertake.
The biomedical engineering department takes a slightly different approach. Students are divided into groups by lottery, and their projects are assigned in the same way. Another difference is that students in biomedical engineering participate in six semesters of intense design, more than other engineering majors. “No other department in the United States, that we know of, has design throughout the curriculum, in any discipline,” Tompkins says.
The civil and environmental engineering department’s undergraduate degree culminates in the capstone course, CEE 578, where students submit plans and proposals for civil construction projects. Like mechanical engineering, the teams are formed based on the interests of the students. As Professor Jeffrey S. Russell, chair of civil and environmental engineering, says, “We ask them what they want to do for a living, then we form the teams.” A typical team consists of four senior students, an advisor who acts as the quality control manager and a “mentor” who is a practicing engineer recruited from industry.
Students in mechanical engineering reported spending an average of four hours a week in class for capstone, and more outside as they approached the end of the semester. When asked about their coursework, many students reported a great amount of satisfaction with the content of the course. The capstone projects are designed in the spirit of “lifelong learning,” with the students undertaking the lion’s share of the responsibility. The students are given guidelines, but are responsible for the majority of their work. They produce regular reports and keep a detailed project notebook in order to simulate, as accurately as possible, the experience of working on a team-based project in industry.
Graduate students are also involved in the capstone courses in some of the departments. The civil and environmental engineering department hires teaching assistants to grade some assignments and to deliver general engineering facts to undergraduates. As Michael D. Doran, adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering, says, “teaching assistants act as mass communicators between the professors and the undergraduates.” The industrial and systems engineering (ISyE) department, along with the manufacturing systems engineering department, offers the ISyE 641 course, which acts as the capstone course for manufacturing systems and a senior elective for the industrial department. Unlike many of the other courses, graduate students form a large part of this course. A team in ISyE consists of one or two undergraduate students, a graduate student and a person who has been exposed to the industry and its practices for a year or more.
The Basic Utility Vehicle capstone group from (left to right) James Pradun, Joe Azukas, Adam Laurent, Jared Amundson and Andrew Knuteson present their design to the rest of the mechanical engineering capstone groups
Photo Credit: Danny MarchewkaBut why a capstone? Why is this particular breed of course found in most the engineering programs at UW-Madison and in engineering curriculums across the country? The key is experience. When the students step into the design classroom for the first time, they are, for the most part, without real world experience in engineering. The purpose of the capstone project is to instill a certain amount of confidence and worldliness to the students before they are let loose on industry. Manner says, “I tell the students when they start this course that they’re already engineers. They’re not going to get much smarter in three months, so they just need confidence in their abilities.” Thus, the capstone course also strives to impart confidence in a group of seniors who, for all intents and purposes, are fully qualified for entry-level jobs in industry.
With all the hubbub surrounding capstone, how do students actually feel about the course? Students generally seem excited about stepping into the course, finding the idea of “getting their hands dirty” appealing as they apply the engineering principles they’ve been learning for the past few years. As Seethapathy says, “[The capstone course is] as close as you can get to doing a live industry project when in school.” Having worked with a team on reducing lead times in a Madison-based company, RenewAire, she says, “The whole course is about going out to the industry, talking to them, getting their problems and solving it for them. It is not completely just academic, since the industries are very serious about the solutions and get them implemented.”
This high level of involvement does have a flipside. Most students currently taking the course feel they should earn more credits for their work. However, most students also recognize that the experience they gain is more valuable than academic credit. Dr John P. Puccinelli, faculty associate in biomedical engineering, earned his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from UW-Madison. Having gone through capstone himself, he knows firsthand the great and not-so-great aspects of the course. “There were times when there were some frustrations, with major constraints being time and money, and the team working to find more resources. But looking back, though six semesters in biomedical engineering might at first seem a lot, you keep learning stuff and the destination is worth the journey,” he says.
The capstone courses do not serve simply as windows into the world of professional engineering, they also open doors to step out into the real world. “The chances are high to be called as interns to the clients’ companies for implementing the proposed solutions. And then one day, you might find yourself being recruited by them,” Seethapathy says.
The capstone courses across the College of Engineering nurture creativity and responsible engineering. Together, the teams strive to deliver novel, cost-effective and sustainable solutions to the community. Students and professors are eager to find the best solutions to the problems presented to them. “It’s an evolving thing, we learn more as we do it. We try our best as a team and develop in the face of a real world challenge,” Professor Doran says. And students aren’t the only ones who benefit from the capstone courses. Doran says, “The students teach us a lot: what they want to learn, the method they want to learn in and in the environment they want to learn it in.”