As research at many institutions becomes more and more interdisciplinary, there is a desire to incorporate such themes into the undergraduate curriculum, specifically by offering interdisciplinary capstone design experiences to senior-level students. At Rice University, faculty responsible for capstone design have found it increasingly challenging to make such experiences beneficial to students, since much knowledge needs to be gained at the intersections of the disciplines. This must usually occur throughout the design process and is specific to a given project.
The result has historically been “division of labor”, where students more comfortable with given aspects of a project take ownership of those portions, while the other students are typically unwilling to acquire the “new” knowledge related to the project. In an attempt to reverse this trend and have more beneficial interdisciplinary design experiences for our students, our mechanical engineering and materials science program has adopted principles of cooperative learning to improve team performance, increase knowledge acquired, and promote truly interactive experiences in the capstone design course.
This paper will highlight the revisions to the course and will use one project (the Medi-Fridge) as a case study for the effectiveness of these implementations. As an example project for these course revisions, this year a group of senior engineering students (three mechanical engineering and two electrical engineering students) worked on a method to keep medication cool for extended periods of time.
This capstone team has developed designs which will provide a solution applicable in many instances and locals. More and more medicines are being developed that allow patients with serious diseases such as multiple sclerosis, diabetes, aids, etc. to live longer and in many cases fuller lives.
A common thread among these medicines is that most of them must be kept cool until they are used. The refrigeration requirement can be a serious problem in third world countries and serious inconvenience in the United States or other developed country for people that need/want to travel for some period of time.
This project has all the capstone design requirements, but also has the strong motivation of helping people that suffer from life threatening and debilitating diseases. Introduction Seniors at our institution are required to take a capstone design course when pursuing a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering.
In recent years, the course instructors have attempted to offer increasingly interdisciplinary projects, and have recruited students from other departments (bioengineering, electrical and computer engineering) to form interdisciplinary teams to tackle these topics. The capstone course is designed to allow the students to use their undergraduate course work in a practical application project.
There are various topics available to the students and range from competitive industry sponsored projects to medical related projects. As the number of interdisciplinary projects has increased over the years, we have seen a trend of increasing interest in such projects, increasing need for new knowledge throughout the project period in order to successfully complete the project, and an increasing divisiveness among teams, especially those involving students from multiple departments. In response to these observations, cooperative learning methods have been incorporated into the course.
Cooperative learning has been shown to improve student-faculty and student-student interaction, information retention, higher-level thinking skills, motivation to learn new material, teamwork, interpersonal skills, and communication skills, all of which encompass the goals of our capstone design course 3 . There are a number of criteria that must be met in order to ensure that cooperative learning is taking place.
These are: positive interdependence, individual accountability, face-to-face interaction, interpersonal skills, and group self-assessment 2 . This paper will discuss specific activities adopted for the course to ensure that cooperative learning is taking place. We will then present a case study for a single student project and discuss the direct benefits of the new course structure. Finally, we will present conclusions related to the course revisions, and a plan for future assessment of the changes. Methods To ensure that we are truly implementing cooperative learning techniques, we have adopted a set of activities and policies for the capstone design course.
This section will outline the five areas required for cooperative learning and our specific activities, based on suggestions of Felder, Brent, and Stice 5 . Also presented, will be some discussion of our methods for team formation. Positive Interdependence To promote positive interdependence, we must create an atmosphere where team members must rely on one another to achieve their goal. When any team member fails, this must reflect on the group as a whole 2 . For this facet of cooperative learning, we have implemented two revisions. First, we have adopted jigsaw activities 4 . In the jigsaw workshops, at least one representative from each group must attend one of three workshop topics that provide support information and resources for the teams. These expert groups have addressed topics listed below.
Then, the experts return to their groups, share the information, and all team members are responsible for the knowledge. These activities serve a number of purposes. We have been able to cover more lecture material than in years past, since we can effectively give three times the course content in one lecture period. Additionally, the interdependence is built in to the activity, satisfying the cooperative learning requirement.
Another policy that we have instituted is a financial bonus to teams with strong Project Pitch presentations. These presentations take place approximately one third of the way through the first semester of the capstone course, and require students to answer why the problem they are addressing is important, why existing solutions (if any) are inadequate, why their proposed solution is the best one, and how they will do it.
The audience for the presentation is potential investors, who must decide which groups are the most convincing and have the best plan. Student and faculty evaluations of the presentations are tabulated, and top performing teams (for example, the best three out of ten) get additional discretionary funds for their team which may be used to purchase team shirts, sponsor a team outing, or purchase additional materials for the project prototype.
