Panel: Integrating Systems Engineering into Engineering Curricula through Capstone Projects

nineteen-month research study sponsored by the US Department of Defense is underway, with the goal of understanding the impact on student learning of systems engineering as well as career interest in the discipline. The project is pursuing this goal through a set of diverse pilot systems and engineering cap-stone experiences, which the defense department is funding in eight civilian universities and six military academies in the United States. Students worked in teams in the context of a capstone course over one to three semesters to produce an actual product or artifact. Each university selected at least one of four authentic problem areas from the Department of Defense (DoD) for students to focus on. Systems engineering faculty led the conceptualization, development, and implementation of the program in most projects, but other faculty, particularly from mechanical engineering and computer science, were involved as well. Almost half of the nearly 300 students participating were undergrad u ates. Four institutions held courses for graduate students only, and three had mixed undergraduate and graduate populations. Fully 41 percent of all students who participated in the programs reported a high level of interest in becoming a systems engineer. Approximately the same percentage reported a high interest in working in this capacity for the government. Preliminary findings from the pilot projects included challenges related to teaching the broad topic of systems engineering to students majoring in fields other than systems engineering; ensuring equivalent grading policies in multidisciplinary student teams; finding meaningful ways for students majoring in other disciplines to contribute to problem areas specific to particular domains; and motivating external mentors to bring authentic professional experiences to the learning experience and helping these mentors to stay involved. Pennsylvania State University's approach to this program was to introduce systems engineering principles to undergraduates from the traditional engineering disciplines and allow the students to apply them in a meaningful way through their capstone design class. An existing multidisciplinary capstone course that attracts students from different engineering disciplines was revised to include a systems engineering focus. The multidisciplinary capstone course is structured to have design teams of three to five students work on client-sponsored design projects. In contrast to discipline-specific capstone courses, the multidisciplinary capstone is intended to have teams with students from three or more fields. Using the existing framework of the multidisciplinary capstone course, the Penn State program introduced systems engineering by including eight modules that covered requirements …