Enabling Institute-wide Multidisciplinary Engineering Capstone Design Experiences

The final culminating Capstone Design course provides students the opportunity to work in teams and apply their knowledge to design, build and test prototypes for solving real-world, open-ended design challenges. Several research studies have shown both qualitative and quantitative advantages for students by working on multidisciplinary Capstone Design projects. All schools within various colleges of the Institute currently only offer the traditional mono-disciplinary Capstone Design course and hence there exists no formal channel for students to collaborate and work together on multidisciplinary Capstone Design projects. In the absence of a common multidisciplinary Capstone Design course, the transition from traditional mono-disciplinary Capstone Design course raises issues of managing faculty teaching expectations, providing administrative support to faculty and student teams and forming multidisciplinary functional student teams. In order to assist with resolving these issues, an online portal was developed to support the implementation of multidisciplinary Capstone Design projects. Faculty and student feedback was solicited in order to conceptualize and develop the website to support the entire process of student team formation, sharing of multidisciplinary project ideas across schools and making student-team assignments. This paper presents the design of this web portal along with a discussion on the scope for further improvement.