The Amalgamation of Industry Practices in an Engineering Capstone Project

A capstone project is introduced to enable the holistic attainment of engineering knowledge by engineering undergraduate students. Integrating project-based-learning and the industrial practices, a capstone project can play an important role in acquiring skills necessary for future employment as well as obtaining professional or chartered engineer status, which is a legal requirement in some countries. A carefully selected capstone project provides the students with the opportunity to learn from professional engineers who are experts in the fields of safety, sustainability, quality management, ethics and project management, this culminates in the use of a CDIO process that is grounded in both theoretical academic knowledge and practical industrial best practices. This paper presents the design and implementation of such a capstone project module, incorporating learning sessions from professional engineers in the five (5) key areas of industry practice highlighted above and how these has contributed to significantly enhancing the learning outcome attainment of engineering undergraduates who have experienced the module.

Proceedings of the 9th International CDIO Conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 9 – 13, 2013.