Student Deliverables And Instruction For A Senior Design Program Course

Nearly all of the senior design courses at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte) were project-only courses. The Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Engineering Technology all had students work on their projects with minimal instruction during the two semester course. Further, the students were only required to submit documentation at the end of each semester. The first semester’s documentation typically looked more like a proposal than a design, and the second semester’s reports often contained more sizzle than content. This level of documentation is not at all related to the documentation that students would be expected to deliver to their management or peers in industry, where format is dictated and content is paramount. Also, the instructors of a new multi-disciplinary senior design program realized that if they were to start adding instruction to the course, they would need to do so gradually to minimize any negative impressions students would have toward attending class (“There was no class lectures last semester”). This paper describes the background of the UNC Charlotte program before these curricular changes. It also describes the deliverable documents that students now submit as assignments. The results were an improved identification of project capabilities and requirements as measured using a published rubric.