Development of a Civil Engineering Capstone Design Course for a New Program

The University of Minnesota Duluth’s Department of Civil Engineering accepted its first students in 2008, graduated its first class in 2012, and first offered a capstone design course in the spring semester, 2012. Groups of five to six students designed a building on a local site. Students organized their teams based on interest in a particular branch of civil engineering, allowing individual students to focus their efforts on a particular subject. Based on feedback from faculty, practicing engineers, and students, several changes were implemented prior to the fall 2012 semester. These changes included making the group size smaller, modifying the graded submissions, and changing the project location. Most significantly, the course was reorganized to prevent students from working the entire semester in one area of civil engineering while doing little to no work in other areas. This paper compares the different capstone design experiences. Results from the analysis are part of a larger comparison between narrow, in-depth and broad, general approaches to design experiences for undergraduate civil engineering students.