Ideas To Consider For New Chemical Engineering Educators: Senior Design

Teaching the senior or “capstone” design course can be intimidating to new faculty members since the course is typically more open ended and project-based compared to other traditional core courses. Faculty with backgrounds in chemistry or physics who join a chemical engineering department may have never taken such a course themselves. In many departments, the course was traditionally taught by a retired industrial practitioner who had a good idea of the types of deliverables that were representative of what students would encounter in the workplace, but this may not be the case today. In addition, the advent of process simulators in the 1970’s and 1980’s had a huge impact on the way that senior design is currently taught. This paper summarizes the author’s selection of the most effective, innovative approaches for the capstone design course reported recently in the literature or discussed at previous conferences. The challenges associated with teaching senior design, and approaches successfully applied to address these challenges, are also described.