Possible Models for CSE Capstone Design Courses (Proposed)

• A single capstone course with projects from different areas: The idea here is that rather than having multiple courses that have a lot in common (such as communication-related issues, team-working issues, discussion of social/ethical considerations, etc.) with each other, have a single course that has two components. The first would deal with these common items. The second part would be the actual design project and would vary from one section of the course to the next. The first part would be taught by someone who has interests and abilities in these general aspects, and the second by someone from the technical area of the particular project. Both instructors would be involved with the entire course.

• A variation on that would be to have several courses that share a "module" dealing with the common items; this module would be taught, in each course, by one person (possibly the same person for the different courses), while the rest of the course is taught by a second person from the corresponding technical area.

• In whatever way the course is organized, one important point is to ensure that not at all class meetings are used for lectures. For one thing, oral presentations by each student will require several class sessions. In addition, it would be useful to have sessions during which teams meet and work on their designs and possibly make informal presentations about their designs to get feedback from the instructor and their peers. In any case, at least 10 class periods should be reserved for these purposes with no more than 30 periods being used for regular lectures; a better distribution might be 20 periods for each; of course, either of these would require the course to meet for 4 hours a week, rather than 3. If the course only meets 3 hours a week, the time devoted to regular lectures should be reduced appropriately so that a sufficient amount of attention is focused on the design activity, as well as on oral presentations and team working.