Incorporating Engineering Challenges into Capstone Design and Senior Project Courses

The Engineering & Design Department of Eastern Washington University (EWU) recently added a Mechanical Engineering (ME) degree to the existing Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET) program. The ME program is more theoretical and requires more advanced mathematics where the MET program is more hands-on with mathematics requirements up to Calculus II. However, the programs are taught side-by-side and complement each other. When we developed the ME program we wanted to maintain as much of the strong hands-on aspect of MET program as possible. Therefore, we teach the required Capstone Design and Senior project courses with a mix of ME and MET students. Prior to creating the ME program, we taught these courses to a mixture of MET, Applied Technology, and Manufacturing option students where the emphasis was given to product development and completion of a small production run. With the development of the new ME program, we decided to teach these classes with a combination of ME and MET students and take advantage of the strong research and development approach. We designed the stronger R&D approach to expose the MET students to applications of the theories taught to the ME students. On the other hand, we expose the ME students to the hands-on shop skills involved in prototype development taught to the MET students. We have taught these courses four times with the new R&D focus, and would like to present our findings and plans.