Engineering is said to be the application of scientific and mathematical principles, but professors Rick Bannerot, Paul Ruchhoeft and Ross Kastor of the Capstone Design course realize the value of communication in engineering.
“Engineers have to have strong communication skills,” said Ruchhoeft, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. “It’s always assumed that these skills will improve after students have finished their technical training, but here we have the opportunity to enhance communications skills before they enter the workforce. We’re focusing on teaching students the connection between solving problems and the communication process -- students who can communicate clearly tend to do better with their projects.”
The Capstone Design course (ECE/INDE/MECE 4334), which Professor Bannerot of mechanical engineering calls a “religious experience,” is the last course for graduating mechanical, industrial and electrical engineers, and it stresses the importance of communications skills. The departments of civil and environmental engineering and chemical engineering have similar senior-level design courses.
“This is the final course where students apply the concepts they have been studying during undergraduate curriculum,” Ruchhoeft said. “Students are really not supposed to be learning anything new. They should be applying existing knowledge to these projects. Lecturing them falls away, and our role becomes more of a facilitator or advisor.”
The projects, which are assigned at the beginning of the semester, are interdisciplinary, and students from mechanical, industrial, electrical and computer engineering work together in teams to complete the task. The professors feel that the interdisciplinary team environment will serve as a learning tool and reduce competition.
“The other purpose of the course is that all of the teams are supposed to be made up of students from other departments,” Bannerot said. “We’d like to move away from projects that are associated with one discipline, so students in a group can all use their knowledge. Since there are so many more electrical engineering students in the class, some of them end up working on the mechanical engineering projects. None of the projects are so sophisticated that any engineering student shouldn’t be able to do it.”
In order to augment the level of writing amidst the students, the Writing Center’s Program Coordinator of Writing In the Disciplines (WID), Jenna Terry, designed a series of workshops that focuses on a variety of issues such as abstract writing, writing proposals and integrating text with figures.
“The students were required to attend two form-based sessions,” Terry said. “In addition, the professors and WID staff identified other improvement areas based on a database of past student work and communications needs in the field of engineering, and developed additional workshops based on those topics.”
The projects, which included an oral and written part, stemmed from the ideas of local companies and the college’s faculty.
“There are a variety of potential projects,” Bannerot said. “Initially, we took many projects from local industry. We’ve been getting fewer and fewer industrial projects, so they’re more internally generated either by engineering faculty or national design competitions.”
At the end of the course, the students must deliver a 30-minute presentation to the professors and their peers, present a poster, and submit a final written report. In addition, each team is required to “validate” its project or its results in a special meeting of the team members and the course instructors. “I call this the inquisition,” said Kastor, professor of mechanical engineering.
One of the professors’ favorite projects this semester dealt with angioplasty, the process by which a blood vessel is repaired by inserting a balloon-tipped catheter to unblock it or by rebuilding or replacing a section of the vessel.
“This team got the project to try to help doctors insert a guidewire through a vein in the groin area leading back to the heart, and then out to the damaged blood vessel,” Kastor said. “The current problem with the procedure is that these veins curve around so much that it’s hard to make guidewire go through.”
The students decided to use a shape memory alloy (SMA), which is trained, through an initial high temperature heating process, to acquire a predetermined shape when heated at a later time. By placing two small strips of the SMA on opposite sides of the guidewire and applying an electric current to selectively heat one or the other strip, the guidewire is forced to bend. That enables the doctor to move quickly and efficiently through the veins.
A primary advantage stated by the students in their oral presentation was timeliness.
“Doctors usually have a difficult time making some of the bends,” Kastor said. “With this thing, they might get an hour surgery down to a few minutes.”
During the presentations, which mark the end of the semester, Terry said she noted a change in attitude, approach and awareness.
“Many students, for a variety of reasons, simply don’t pay adequate attention to writing issues,” Terry said. “Unless a curriculum comprehensively and consistently emphasizes writing instruction and writing practice, students won’t realize writing is useful and important. Increasing students’ awareness is an enormous step -- these workshops help students get there.”
The professors and Terry have had an abstract accepted to the Annual National Meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education and will complete the paper in late January.
“We think what we’re doing here is pretty neat and unique,” Terry said. “And we’d like to enter a national discourse. Other programs and universities are interested in what we’re doing, and perhaps this paper will lead to discussions with other educators. That’s good for the university, the College of Engineering, and the Writing Center. These three professors have dedicated so much of themselves to the Capstone program. They’re doing interesting and valuable work, and they deserve an opportunity to communicate that to their peers at UH and other institutions.”