Balancing Learning Objectives And Success In A Multidisciplinary Senior Design Project

In the Fall of 2005, a team of five engineering seniors was assigned a multidisciplinary senior project in which they were to design and build a power generation system for a small village on Ometepe Island in Lake Nicaragua. The power generated was to be used for lights in a small clinic and a classroom, a refrigerator for vaccines, and an emergency radio. In light of tight budgetary constraints, students decided to augment their budget through fund-raising and expand the scope of the project to a fully-installed, on-site, working prototype, which would require all five students to travel to the village in Nicaragua. This aggressive plan of work was instituted by the students themselves. As instructors for this course, we were charged with two important tasks: to guide the students towards the learning objectives set forth for the course and to help the students fulfill their goal of providing power to a village in need. In previous implementations of projects for this course, the small scale of former projects allowed the course to set the schedule for assignments, reports, and prototype progress. However, the real-world nature of the Nicaragua project sought to drive the schedule of the course, these two needs at times appearing to conflict with each other. This paper discusses these apparent conflicts, the decisions made by the adviser and other faculty members in the course to resolve these conflicts, and the reasoning that drove these decisions. The successes of the project will also be discussed. Two of these successes are that four of the five team members were able to travel to Nicaragua to install the wind generator and that it has been operating continually since March 2006. Outline