Web Based Tools And Course Materials For Teaching Capstone Design Internationally

After years of collaboration and discussions 1 , the authors found it highly desirable to develop and share a set of web-based course materials and tools for teaching senior capstone design in different countries. Because different countries may have different requirements of the educational objectives for graduating seniors, the course material has a minimum set of topics which will be used by all participating schools. Then, a more extensive part of the course material will be elective topics that cover special needs. These special needs could be different government or ABET requirements, or it could be project specific knowledge that is too specialized to be taught to all students. An example of the common topics is how to use Quality Function Development to generate a set of quantifiable design objectives. An example of the elective topics is the tolerance stack analysis and design, which is necessary knowledge for design projects requiring high precisions assemblies. Some developed and under-developing web-based teaching tools, which can be also used in real world engineering design, are searchable design case libraries located on different computers at different schools, and optimization tool box that can be executed using web browser from different part of the world. More practically useful tools will be described and presented, such as the computing tool to obtain the preferred fits and tolerance, and the unit conversion tool for converting Imperial units to metric units. A major concern for current and future development of web-based tools is the copyright or intellectual property right issue. Currently, unless these tools are developed by collaborating faculty members or students, commercial software are not shared by participating schools. Some information and software tools are very important to high quality capstone designs, the authors are exploring the possibilities and technical constraints of sharing national standards, material properties specified in different national standards. From international collaboration and working on capstone education, the authors found many teaching tools and materials developed and used by teaching capstone can be used also for other undergraduate mechanical engineering courses.