Awards
Best Paper Award is given each year for the best conference paper submitted to the division. In addition to a certificate a cash prize of $750 is awarded the authors.
2008 Best Paper Award
AC 2007-2005: ENGINEERING DESIGN: ARE WE TEACHING THE RIGHT STUFF?
Rudolph Eggert, Boise State University
Developing an undergraduate engineering design curriculum can be a challenge. Using the continuous improvement process adopted by ABET 2000, engineering programs typically consider: which outcomes our program should set out to achieve, which assessment measures to use, and how we should make revisions to develop our program. To achieve the “outcomes” program faculty carefully develop curricula including what should be taught, and also when and how it should be taught.
This study reviewed literature, beginning with 1991, covering capstone design and design education in general. The composition of respondents varies such as group surveys covering capstone design among different disciplines and other, more narrowly focused surveys. In summary the studies indicate that since Dixon’s seminal article in 1991 we have seen: increased emphasis in integrating the Product Realization Process, improvement in the working definitions of design and design processes, an increase in the number of design topics taught in capstone design from 1994 to 2005, but, an apparent and dramatic decrease in the number of design topics from 2003-2006.
2007 Best Paper Award
2006-853: USING RUBRICS FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF SENIOR DESIGN
PROJECTS
John K. Estell, Ohio Northern University
Juliet Hurtig, Ohio Northern University
Abstract
The process of evaluating senior design projects typically involves assessing reports and presentations, then assigning relatively broad performance categories to the work. Unfortunately, the use of professional judgment in this process varies from faculty member to faculty member; as a consequence, one person’s “excellent” can be another person’s “very good.” The lack of standard definitions for such terms act as an impedance toward fair and impartial grading of student performance.
At its 2002 Faculty Retreat, the Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science
(ECCS) Department at Ohio Northern University examined the effectiveness of the senior design evaluation process. Senior design at this school is a year-long endeavor, with multiple teams of faculty grading several capstone projects each at the end of each quarter. The differences between the individual graders and between each team of graders were readily apparent, making it difficult to negotiate to a final fair course letter grade for the students. Accordingly, standard definitions were developed in the form of rubrics for each one of the four communication formats utilized in our senior design sequence. These rubrics are distributed at the beginning of each term to both students and faulty. The written report evaluation is conducted through the use of three separate rubrics: writing style, technical design, and consideration factors for addressing the coverage of multiple realistic design constraints as called for in the ABET Criteria. Each student team is required to make two oral presentations throughout the capstone process; a rubric specific to oral presentations guides these evaluations. External evaluators are invited to campus to judge the senior design poster competition, and these individuals follow a rubric specific to the poster format. A final rubric focuses on web site design, where students provide an overview of their project and the results obtained.
Since the inclusion of rubrics in the 2002-2003 academic year, subsequent evaluations performed at annual Faculty Retreats have indicated that the rubrics have been a successful model for conducting the evaluation of the various aspects of the senior design experience. Additionally, by coalescing subjective faculty judgments into an objective numerical form through the use of rubrics, the results can be readily used for program outcomes assessment. As a result of this methodology, what was once considered to be essentially a random process by the students is now a more uniform process grounded in a fundamental set of definitions accessible by all.