Integration of Capstone Experience and Externally Funded Faculty Research
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Capstone projects are important components in undergraduate educational experience. At Texas A & M University, students are required to go through a two-semester design process to develop new products. The capstone projects are typically sponsored by industrial partners. The industrysponsored projects allow students to work on real-world projects with inputs from engineers and customers and have brought critically important benefits to the Electronics Engineering Technology and Telecommunication Engineering Technology (EET/TET) programs at Texas A & M University. Recently, several capstone projects were sponsored by faculty members instead of industrial partners. These projects played an important role of supporting some larger scale externally funded faculty research projects. Undergraduate students involved in these projects as a capstone team had to work with graduate students, faculty members, and potential customers. Software, hardware, interface, system integration, and testing all involved other researchers instead of just the capstone team. In some sense, these kinds of projects resemble larger scale projects in industry. In addition to the student learning during their capstone experience, the faculty members were more motivated and more actively involved. In this article, a capstone project sponsored by faculty members is discussed. 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.
