Novel Course Design and Assessment of Electrical Engineering Capstone Project

With the rapid development and progress of science and technology, in order to help student to meet the everchanging engineering requirements, aiming at the criteria of complex engineering problem solving and continuous improvement established by WA and ABET, this paper proposes a novel course design and assessment method which is applied to the Electrical Engineering (EE) capstone course "Comprehensive Design of Power Electronic Technology"in North China University of Technology. With the introduction of the Hardware in-the-loop simulation phase into the procedure of the capstone course, a "four-dimensional"practical teaching mode including theoretical analysis phase, digital simulation phase, hardware in-the-loop phase and physical experiment phase has been established which allows students to experience more realistic complex engineering problem. And another distinguished feature of the capstone course is the participation of enterprise mentors during the entire designing process. This diversifies the course assessment and consequently a "vectorized"assessment system is accomplished by the participation of group members, course instructors and enterprise mentors. Thus, students' research potential, practical ability and communication & cooperation can be evaluated separately and objectively. On the other hand, a capstone course survey is designed to collect students' feedback from various aspects, and the feedback result analysis and the corresponding course adjustment has been elaborated, thus the continuous improvement of the capstone course is realized.