Senior Freshman Collaboration In A Capstone Design Course

An innovative capstone design course entitled “Design of Fluid Thermal Systems,” involves groups of seniors working on various semester-long design projects. Once projects are awarded, freshmen enrolled in the “Introduction to Mechanical Engineering” course are assigned to work with the senior design teams. The senior teams function like small consulting companies that employ co-operative education students; e.g., the freshmen. One of the objectives of building this collaboration is a desire to increase the retention rate of the freshmen by involving them with the seniors in some interesting design work. Additionally, the seniors benefit by gaining team leadership experience, and by developing the ability to communicate their ideas to a non-technical audience as their design work progresses. This project began in Fall 2001, and at the conclusion of that semester, an assessment instrument was administered to the seniors to ascertain their opinion of the experience. After reviewing the comments made by the seniors, improvements were made to this project, and these improvements were implemented in Fall 2002. At the end of the Fall 2002 semester an assessment was made and the following conclusions were drawn: • The seniors and the freshmen all believed that the interaction was a rewarding experience. • The seniors felt that their freshmen co-ops made useful contributions to the overall design effort. The freshmen also believed this was so. • The seniors learned to appreciate the management problems encountered while managing co-workers with limited technical expertise. • The seniors and the freshmen both recommended that the program be continued in the future. Background “Design of Fluid Thermal Systems” is a senior-level, capstone design course at the University of Memphis. Students in this course are divided into groups of 3, 4 or 5 members who work together as a team on a design project. Selected projects are presented to the design teams who must bid competitively on three of the projects. The design team with the lowest bid is awarded that particular project to work on for the entire semester. (See the text listed in the Bibliography for information on the bidding process.) Design teams are treated like companies and as such, each group chooses a company name and designs a company logo. Titles of projects for the Fall 2002 semester are provided in Table 1. Some groups developed web sites for their companies. More detailed project descriptions are provided in the Appendix of this paper. Groups elect a Project Director who meets with the course instructor on a weekly basis. The Project Director works with the group members to identify a list of tasks required in order to finish the project by the end of the semester. The list of tasks includes, for example, sizing and selecting P ge 8.007.1 Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education a pipe to convey a specific fluid; sizing and selecting a pump; selecting a heat exchanger; predicting system performance; and writing a report about the design of the system. When the tasks are identified, a completion date is selected for each one. By the end of the fifth week of the semester, for instance, a pipe material and size will be selected. The tasks and target completion dates are summarized in the form of a task planning sheet, an example of which is in Table 2. Also included on the task planner is the name/initials of the individual responsible for completing the task. Each group member keeps and maintains a notebook or diary of all tasks completed for the project. The diary contains any and all details of the work done by that particular member on the project. This would include something as short as a phone call, or as detailed as calculations to predict when a pump will cavitate. Table 1. Project titles and company logos. Title # of Engrs Student Designed Logos Design of a Shaved Ice Maker 3 Avoidance of Hydraulic Shock in an Oil System 4 Cooling System for a Series of Heat Sources 5 Design of an Experiment to Illustrate the First Law of Thermodynamics 3 Solar Hot Dog Cooker 4