How We Teach: Capstone Design

Capstone design was the topic of the 2022 survey by AIChE's Education Division's Curriculum Survey Committee. This paper reports on the results from fifty-eight responses from institutions in the United States. Institutions are more likely to have a two- or three-course capstone design series than a single capstone course (68% to 27%) with a mean of 5.4 credit hours. Some institutions (20%) have design courses throughout the curriculum in addition to the capstone design sequence, but more programs (40%) have design projects within non-design courses throughout the curriculum. The course or courses in the capstone design sequence are primarily offered only once a year (78%) with a slight edge to the spring semester/winter quarter (80%) over the fall semester/quarter (72%). Most institutions (78%) include instruction in software or programming as part of the course(s). The culminating design project is most often a theoretical design (68%) as opposed to one based on experiments (3%) or resulting in a prototype (7%), and most institutions do not use the AIChE Design Competition problems (70%). Professional skills are mainly lightly covered with the exception of professional communication being covered in depth at 58% of institutions. At most institutions, capstone design is used to assess the extent of ABET outcome achievement for all seven outcomes except #6 (develop and conduct appropriate experimentation…). Students typically complete only one culminating major design project (67%) in a team of 4.0 (mean) students. The mean of unique projects completed by the cohort is 8.6, but the mode is one project for the entire cohort (28% of institutions). Students receive formal feedback on their progress weekly at 50% of the institutions and every other week at 23% of institutions. The mode for weekly student time spent on projects is 6-10 hours per week (62% of institutions). The mean size of a faculty team teaching capstone design is 2.8 faculty. Fifty-eight percent of the instructors have at least three years of industrial experience, and instructors are split nearly evenly between teaching-track and tenure-track. At least one capstone design instructor is a licensed professional engineer at 43% of the responding institutions. The faculty collaborate with industry at 65% of responding institutions.