Toying with a Capstone Design Course

Oakland University has pioneered a unique approach to capstone design projects. Multidisciplinary student groups invent a new electrical, mechanical, or electromechanical game or toy, design it, and build a working prototype. The prototype is then delivered to an internationally‐known toy and game agency. The best of the prototypes are then presented by the agency to major national and international game and toy companies. If the toy or game is selected for production, the possibility exists for significant financial benefit both for the school and the students. Real world considerations such as creativity, project feasibility, and costs (particularly in mass quantity), all factor into the ultimate student goal, which is to have their project selected by the agents. The burden of devising the projects is largely removed from the professor and copying from earlier projects is virtually impossible. Design of a good game or toy is often much more difficult than it appears—projects invariably knit together the many engineering skills a student has acquired through the course of obtaining a bachelor's degree as well as from the rest of their life experiences. Ultimately, the engineering school also benefits from these projects through the possibility of substantial publicity, either with local display of student projects, or through press coverage surrounding a successful project picked up by a major international toy company.     

Cooperative Learning Instructional Activities in a Capstone Design Course

In developing our capstone design course, we decided to include instruction in design methodology, project management, engineering communications, and professional ethics, along with a comprehensive design project. As this course evolved over a number of years, we found that active and cooperative learning was critical for effective instruction in these topics and we developed a series of instructional activities using this methodology. These activities consisted of short presentations (mini‐lectures) with interspersed team exercises. We describe our course, these instructional activities, and some evaluation data showing that our students found them effective and important. Our experiences convinced us that the cooperative learning approach both enhanced our students' understanding of these topics and encouraged them to incorporate the associated skills into their working skill set. Including team exercises that dealt with various steps in the design process provided a “jump‐start” on these unfamiliar activities in a structured, short duration exercise environment in class. Listening to presentations by other teams and reviewing and discussing another team's results as a part of the team exercises provided an opportunity to see and think about different formulations of the problem they just considered.     

Designing and Teaching Courses to Satisfy the ABET Engineering Criteria

Since the new ABET accreditation system was first introduced to American engineering education in the middle 1990s as Engineering Criteria 2000, most discussion in the literature has focused on how to assess Outcomes 3a‐3k and relatively little has concerned how to equip students with the skills and attitudes specified in those outcomes. This paper seeks to fill this gap. Its goals are to (1) overview the accreditation process and clarify the confusing array of terms associated with it (objectives, outcomes, outcome indicators, etc.); (2) provide guidance on the formulation of course learning objectives and assessment methods that address Outcomes 3a‐3k; (3) identify and describe instructional techniques that should effectively prepare students to achieve those outcomes by the time they graduate; and (4) propose a strategy for integrating program‐level and course‐level activities when designing an instructional program to meet the requirements of the ABET engineering criteria.     

A Model Curriculum for a Capstone Course in Multidisciplinary Engineering Design

This paper describes our efforts to develop a curricular and pedagogical model for teaching multidisciplinary design to sen ior-level undergraduate engineering students. In our model, we address concerns of industry and engineering educators about the often narrow technical confines within which engineering design is currently taught. Our two-semester design sequence employs multidisciplinary teams of students working with faculty managers for industrial clients to solve complex, open-ended problems possessing numerous technical and non-technical constraints. After a two year pilot phase, the multidisciplinary senior design (MSD) course sequence is now offered to qualified Colorado School of Mines seniors each academic year and fully meets the senior capstone design requirement in each of the participating academic departments. An on-going formative and summative evaluation process allows us to monitor the perceptions and knowledge levels of our students compared with students completing traditional discipline-specific design courses. Our students, faculty, and clients overwhelmingly agree that multidisciplinary design teams tend to produce better engineering designs because of the broader range of expertise available to the team. MSD students strongly agree that higher order thinking skills such as open-ended problem-solving abilities, engineering analysis, and engineering synthesis are important aspects of the design process. Students also rate the course highly and indicate satisfaction with the course structure and curriculum. In addition, project clients are pleased with the quality of the final designs they receive from our students. Our experience has led us to conclude that undergraduate engineering students can thrive in a carefully designed multidisciplinary environment.     

Delivery and Assessment of Senior Capstone Design via Distance Education

The University of North Dakota (UND) School of Engineering and Mines (SEM) Departments of Chemical, Electrical, and Mechanical Engineering offer a unique capstone design course. The course is offered to distance education students at their industrial work sites using company‐based projects and industry mentors. Each department offers this course as partial fulfillment of an ABET‐accredited Bachelor of Science degree.     

A New Senior Level Course in International Design

The internationalization of the design arena is incontestable. Although many engineering design educators support the idea of incorporating international design issues into engineering design courses, only a few engineering design programs appear to actually give proper consideration to these topics. We recently originated and developed a course entitled “International Design,” which we first team-taught in the Spring of 1997 at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology in Ishikawa, Japan. The course, open to senior and graduate students of various engineering disciplines, featured lectures and a quarter long team design project. The philosophy and contents of the course are presented in this paper.     

Using a Systematic Engineering Design Process to Conduct Undergraduate Engineering Management Capstone Projects

This paper presents an overview and lessons learned during the evolution of our capstone design experience from case studies to relevant, connected problems. We present some of the pros and cons of conducting real world capstones at the undergraduate level, student's perceptions of the experience, and lessons learned that can reduce the overhead associated with incorporating a real world experience into an undergraduate Engineering Management program. We also discuss how a capstone can be used to effectively develop those non‐technical skills and close competency gaps identified by industry. Lastly, we present a life cycle framework for conducting capstones that we feel is important for ensuring a meaningful experience.     

Designing a mirror to realize a given projection

I present a design technique for realizing given projections as catadioptric sensors. In general, these problems do not have solutions, but approximate solutions may often be found that are visually acceptable. The method described reduces the problem to solving a linear system. A given transformation from the image plane to an object surface is shown to determine a vector field that is normal to the surface in the case where the vector field is a gradient. For the case when the vector field is not a gradient, several functionals are presented that may be minimized to give approximate solutions. As an application several new designs are described, including a mirror that directly gives a full 360-deg cylindrical projection without the need for any digital processing.     

A Template for Organizing Efforts to Satisfy ABET EC 2000 Requirements

This paper presents a template that departments may use to organize their efforts to satisfy ABET Engineering Criteria 2000 requirements. The template is based on the premise that each course in a BS curriculum should be designed to service well-defined “Student Learning Tasks” that have been derived from program objectives. The template is such that, as a department creates files and documents to fill it, “Objectives of the Department” will derive from stakeholder demands; “Graduate Attributes” will derive from “Objectives of the Department”; a set of “Student Learning Tasks” will be associated with each “Graduate Attribute”; courses comprising the BS degree curriculum will cover all “Student Learning Tasks”; and a suitable scheme of assessment and self-evaluation will connect all elements together for continuous improvement purposes. The template helps to clarify relations among EC 2000 components, and sifts content from format in doing so. Some information matrix formats are recommended, and the paper closes by indicating how program characteristics such as subject-matter integration and cooperative learning may be defined using some of the matrices presented.     

Determination of the Size of a Sampling Inspection to Satisfy Specified Requirements on Estimators of Probabilistic Indicators

Expressions are obtained for determining the necessary size of a sampling inspection in the use of point estimators of the likelihood maximum, average risk minimum, and Leman criterion. Recommendations for their application are given.     

Designing a Production Line to Maximize Profit

The relationship between profitability and efficiency in a production line is discussed at length for the continuous production model. We prove that a solution which maximizes efficiency will not necessarily maximize profit. Several useful relationships between profitability and efficiency are developed which can greatly enhance computational efficiency. A solution procedure is developed which will determine the optimal number of work stations by maximizing an assumed profit function. An example is provided to illustrate these relationships and the entire solution procedure.     

Designing a mirror to form a line-shaped directivity diagram

We design a mirror to form a directivity diagram defined as a vector function of one argument. An analytical solution for the problem of generating a line-shaped directivity diagram from a point source is derived. The mirror calculation reduces to solving an ordinary differential equation. A mirror to generate the line-shaped directivity diagram of angular size 120° and uniform intensity is designed.     

Designing reflectors to generate a line-shaped directivity diagram

A novel method of designing a mirror surface to generate a directivity diagram represented as a vector function of one argument is presented. A general relationship for the mirror surface for an arbitrary illuminating beam wavefront is derived as an envelope of a parametric family of surfaces. Each surface in the family transforms the input beam into a beam with plane wavefront of desired direction. For the spherical illuminating beam the mirror surface is given as the envelope of the family of rotational paraboloids. The envelope is represented as a family of curves given by the intersections of paraboloids with circular cones of rays from the point source.     

了解客户需求，帮助客户降低成本

尽管国内软包企业一直在寻找一条有效的成本降低途径，许多企业也提出了全员、金方位、全过程的成本管理模式，而在成本管理的现实操作中，大部分企业把成本降低的着力点放在对生产成本的单一控制上，忽视了终端用户方面。服务终端并不是仅仅是做好售后服务，可以站在终端用户的角度，在满足用户需求的基础上，帮助客户降低生产成本，提高利润空间，这样才能使企业做大做强，让企业走得更远，飞得更高。     

在“产业经济学”课程教学中培养研究型学习能力的方法探讨

从学习方法上看,大学生应当从吸纳型的学习方式转换到研究型的学习方式,从而逐渐培养起研究、批判和创新的能力.文章以“产业经济学”的课程教学为例,针对如何培养学生的研究型学习能力问题,从方法论角度总结了作者近年来的课堂教学探索工作.     

实验室如何提高客户服务的满意度

实验室的客户服务工作在激烈的市场竞争中显得非常重要,是值得关注和讨论的话题。为了更好地完善和改进实验室客户服务的工作,本文对提高客户服务的满意度的具体做法进行了探讨。     

Designing a software reliability programme

Designing reliable software is becoming an ever increasing problem because the high cost of software is largely due to reliability problems. The costs of finding and fixing the errors, better known as maintenance and testing costs, account for as much as 80 per cent of the total cost of the final software product. Software developers now have an even greater interest in preventing errors from making their way into the software and finding the errors that are present in the early stages of development. Precise software design, coding and testing play an important role. This paper presents a management plan for implementing a software reliability programme at a small software industry where no reliability programme yet exists and no reliability programme is yet established.