The Use Of Superclients In A Civil Engineering Capstone Design Class

The capstone design class in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa is a three-semester hour class, with an enrollment of between 30 and 50 students in recent years. In the ideal, this class should offer students the opportunity to demonstrate that their education has brought them to a point at which they can begin to contribute effectively in the workplace. However, finding a project that is sufficiently challenging presents a perennial challenge. To address this issue, the class was changed in 1997 to allow local civil engineers to provide projects for the students. These local civil engineers served as “superclients” for the students, who worked on their projects in groups of five or six. Students were able to visit project sites and “kick the tires,” which substantially reduced student complaints that projects were not realistic. They also had the experience of interacting with clients who were not faculty. While the approach creates some logistic difficulties, the benefits are substantial. The paper describes both, and reports on the problems and successes of this particular approach.