The BBE Engineering Capstone class is a 4-credit, one semester course offered Spring semester each year. Each year 20-30 BBE students participate in the course, most of them are seniors in their last semester of our engineering program. Students work in teams of 3-4 and are required to complete their project in 14 weeks. Each of the students spends an estimated 140 hours on the project.
The course has 28 two-hour class periods that students are required to attend. A small fraction of the class time is devoted to team building, project management, ethics, engineering economics, as well as discussions regarding the environmental, global, cultural, and social considerations of engineering projects. The remainder of the time they are working in their teams on their design projects and supervised by the course instructors.
Capstone projects come primarily from outside organizations that like to mentor and engage the next generation of engineers and have an engineering problem to solve.