OHLAND, Matthew W.1, ANDERSON, Tim2, OLLIS, David F.3, PHILLIPS, Douglas H.4, MURRAY, Kenneth H.5 & HEBRANK, Jack6
1 Chemical Engineering, University of Florida, ohland@ce.ufl.edu
2 Chemical Engineering, University of Florida, tim@nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu
3 Chemical Engineering, North Carolina State University, ollis@che.ncsu.edu
4 Electrical Engineering, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, hphillip@uncc.edu
5 Civil Engineering, North Carolina A&T State University, kmurray@ncat.edu
6 Embrex, Inc., jhebrank@embrex.com
Abstract: Multidisciplinary design experiences are an increasing component of engineering curricula because industry values such experience and because the new ABET/EC 2000 criteria require it. Consistent with this trend, the eight-campus Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education (SUCCEED) has committed to have installed on each campus by the year 2002 at least one multidisciplinary capstone design course.
This paper shows that a number of approaches are possible, achieving numerous objectives, and demonstrating success in different ways. Some use government and industry sponsorship to enhance viability (e.g.: Concurrent Engineering at Georgia Tech received sponsorship from the US Army; Quality Improvement Partnerships (QIP) at UNC Charlotte, NC A&T, and NC State serve Burlington Industries and NorTel as clients). Others demonstrate that industry sponsorship is not necessary for success (e.g.: Cross-Disciplinary Education at Clemson). Some enhance their integrative nature through international partnerships (e.g.: Multidisciplinary Design in a Global Environment at Virginia Tech) or through partnerships with other universities (e.g.: Multi-University Design Teams at Clemson, Georgia Tech, U South Carolina, and South Carolina State). Multidisciplinary experiences can be housed in a single department (as many are) or managed directly by the College of Engineering (e.g.: Integrated Product and Process Design (IPPD) at U Florida). In addition to horizontal integration across disciplines, design teams may be integrated vertically (e.g.: Virginia Tech’s Virtual Corporations), providing multidisciplinary experiences for pre-college, community college, senior-level students.
Success is demonstrated by growth and institutionalization (e.g.: UF’s IPPD program began with 5 projects and 30 students and will stabilize at ~25 projects serving ~150 students), through persistence (e.g.: Engineering Entrepreneurs at NC State participants are significantly more likely to graduate in engineering and in the major they started in than their non-participant counterparts), and by other means.
Keywords: multidisciplinary, design, capstone, cross-disciplinary, integration
The engineering education community in the United States has in recent years increasingly sought to teach design the way that it happens in the real world—in multidisciplinary teams. The Engineering Design Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University uses industrially sponsored research projects in a two-semester design course in which teams of undergraduate and graduate students design wearable computers (AMON et al., 1996). Faculty at San Jose State and Cal Poly used microelectronic device fabrication to give focus to an interdisciplinary course (MUSCAT et al., 1997). MIT’s Engineering and Management Schools collaborate in an interdisciplinary design course (EPPINGER et al., 1990). At Auburn, electronically guided model rockets are used to make a senior design course interdisciplinary (HODEL AND BAGINSKI, 1995). An industry-supported multidisciplinary design course was introduced at the Colorado School of Mines (MILLER and OLDS, 1994).
Efforts toward providing multidisciplinary design experiences for engineering students were significantly strengthened when ”the ability to function on multidisciplinary teams” was identified as a specific education outcome required of 21st century graduates of US engineering programs by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology’s Engineering Criteria 2000 (ABET EC 2000). This outcome arose at the urging of the major employers of graduating engineers: industry and government. This demand leaves faculty and students in unfamiliar territory—a place where students operate in collaboration rather than competition; a place where the focus is on shared responsibility rather than self-sufficiency.
Most current design courses are largely or exclusively disciplinary, coming as they do at the end of a concentrated sequence of courses created originally to produce a competent, specialized engineer. The requirement of functionality on multidisciplinary teams seems like another entry on a long list of curricular mandates—work in teams, collaborate with industry, teach professionalism and ethics, write reports, give oral presentations. Another recent challenge is that the curriculum must do all this—and more—while reducing the student course load. Given this history of demands, the addition of the ABET EC 2000 criteria has not been welcomed universally. The nature of multidisciplinary design, however, allows the incorporation of a variety of objectives, including those of ABET EC 2000.
The Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education (SUCCEED) was formed in 1991, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Education Coalitions program, to develop a model for comprehensive curriculum reform to meet the needs of the next century. SUCCEED’s member institutions are the University of Florida (the Coalition headquarters), Clemson University, Florida A&M University, Florida State University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina A&T State University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. SUCCEED’s model for this curriculum began with the definition of a set of student outcomes—a list that corresponds nearly one-to-one with the list enumerated in ABET’s EC 2000 Criteria, although SUCCEED’s list was developed earlier. As a result, by the time the new Criteria were released by ABET, SUCCEED had already researched approaches to meeting these outcomes. This paper addresses a variety of ways to satisfy the need for students ”to function in multidisciplinary teams.”
In our second phase of funding, one of SUCCEED’s key milestones is that each campus will implement a real-world multidisciplinary capstone experience by 2002. To bring focus to the variety of approaches researched from 1991-1996, and to spur broader implementation of these programs, a workshop was held at UNC-Charlotte on March 25, 1998. Representatives of nine strong multidisciplinary design approaches developed at least in part through SUCCEED funding in 1991-1996 were presented. This paper describes these different approaches and discusses what we may learn from the aggregate.
The Engineering Entrepreneurs program at NC State uses a vertically integrated team of senior leaders and sophomore through senior team participants. Multisemester participation is encouraged—team members earn one semester hour of credit for each semester they participate, and senior leaders earn capstone design credit for their greater role, which includes mentoring the members. The program is organized around the theme of entrepreneurship, and features weekly seminars by speakers from the local entrepreneurial community. The weekly speakers have included attorneys, management consultants, marketing specialists, founders of entrepreneurial companies (successful and otherwise), venture capitalists, plant managers, and manufacturing engineers (MILLER, 1995).
Program participants initiate small companies to produce a selected product. Weekly meetings with a faculty advisor for each project replace formal lectures. While the course has been offered within one department at NC State (electrical engineering), the nature of the seminar series and of the team responsibilities indicate that this structure provides yet another possible approach to providing the multidisciplinary design experience. IBM has participated in the program since inception, providing both personnel and equipment. Co-ops have been offered by IBM to participants, and presentations to the IBM Systems Networking division are a biannual event. In addition to IBM’s ongoing support, the IEEE has also sponsored the professional publication of course materials.
Student evaluations indicate that participants felt they learned a great deal from each other (72%) and from their leaders (84%). That 83% of students agreed with ”I wish I had this course earlier in my academic career” is emphasized by the fact that 10% of the participants are freshmen. In addition to this survey data, a longitudinal study of the persistence of program participants indicated excellent evidence of the program’s benefit—the first four cohort years had no attrition at all (BRAWNER, 1998).
Figure 1. Persistence of Engineering Entrepreneurs participants
The Integrated Product and Process Design (IPPD) program at the University of Florida is a two-semester program in which 6-member teams with representation from business majors as well as engineering disciplines work with a faculty coach and collaborate with industry technical advisors. Corporate sponsors provide a project that fills a real need, but does not require solution sooner than eight months. In addition, the project should not be proprietary or secret, should involve both design and manufacturing, and must be funded by a $15K grant from that company, which is also to provide a 2-4 hr/wk liaison engineer. The project team deliverables are product specifications, concept generation and evaluation, a preliminary design report, a project plan, and analytical and experimental plan and report, a systems level design report, prototype results and report, a production sample, an acceptance test report, and a final report and project documentation (EISENSTADT et al, 1996).
After its 1995 pilot, the program was scaled up to a peak in 1997 of 180 seniors from 9 disciplines, 23 faculty (part time), and 29 projects. The projects included online distillation stream measurements, solenoid valve health monitoring system, pressure gauge redesign, secure wireless LAN (local area network), home automation serial port modem, laser mode switch redesign, and process control for a water treatment plant. The program has since been cut back to approximately 25 projects, a level that can be sustained in terms of coordination and space requirements.
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Figure 2. IPPD enrollment |
Figure 3. IPPD projects and faculty |
A SUCCEED pilot project in establishing effective, multi-university student teams for addressing interdisciplinary projects laid the groundwork for a senior capstone underway since 1994 involving Clemson, University of South Carolina, South Carolina State, and since 1996, Georgia Tech. The institutions formed teams across four disciplines to address projects contributed by the Westinghouse Savannah River Site. Project organization required considerable electronic communication between students and faculty at different locations, and telephone, fax, e-mail, computer conferences, web sites, and videoconferences were all used to provide necessary linkages. The course in 1995-1996 (over all semesters) involved 110 students comprising 23 teams, investigating such projects as in-situ plasma arc soil vitrification, sludge decantation, repair tool design, precipitation process development, sump cleanout process, and winch design.
Concurrent engineering and integrated product and process design principles form the foundation of this initiative at Georgia Tech. Team projects include competitions sponsored nationally by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, with design examples ranging from engines to individual aircraft to hybrid-rocket designs. Teams have garnered multiple victories in national aircraft and engine design competitions since the program’s inception. Vertical integration is broad, involving students from the high school through the graduate level. Graduate students study concurrent engineering and integrated product and process design approaches, following a five-course sequence (concurrent engineering, life cycle cost, multidisciplinary design optimization, and two aerospace system design offerings), undergraduates take some of the same courses as electives, and high school students participate as part of a summer camp experience (GORDON and SCHRAGE, 1994 and SCHRAGE, 1997).
This design, which began as an experiment in vertical integration, has evolved into a comprehensive program in which undergraduate students at all levels and from various departments collaborate with students at a university in a different country. Only half of each team’s membership is comprised of senior level students as the team works to design an entire general aviation aircraft. The team at the international university is similarly formed, and the two teams share their progress via the Internet and visits (MARCHMAN, 1998). Student evaluation of the program has been very positive, as shown by their responses to a five-point Likert-scale survey (MARCHMAN et al., 1997).
Table 1. Student evaluation of program in pilot stage.
| Survey statement |
Likert scale response 1=strongly disagree 5=strongly agree |
| My participation in the SUCCEED program: | |
| played a role in my choice of major. | 4.0 |
|
affected my selection of classes and electives. |
4.0 |
|
helped me choose my senior design project. |
3.3 |
|
prepared me and gave me the ability to |
4.5 |
|
raised my academic standing in the university (grades) |
3.8 |
|
I feel the SUCCEED program increased my potential for employment, a co-op position or a summer internship. |
4.3 |
|
I feel that my efforts were beneficial to the design on which I worked. |
4.1 |
|
I was welcomed into the design group and not made to feel that I was in the way. |
4.5 |
|
The work required for the design project was too much and conflicted with my normal workload. |
2.3 |
The student survey responses coming as many as 5 years after students originally participated in the project as a freshman, are very consistent with those received in surveys taken immediately after the semester of participation. The success of the project has attracted support from industry as well; Boeing has begun to provide funding that will not only maintain the current level of international involvement in this multidisciplinary design experience, but also encourage expansion to the Pacific Rim.
The aim of the creative projects laboratory has been to serve as a broker for multidisciplinary design projects for departments in the college of engineering at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The laboratory directors (two faculty members) secured potential projects from a variety of industrial partners, who made donations to the college of $1000-$5000, depending on the size of the company. Companies were invited to the college to make presentations to the students and faculty. Students were encouraged to form teams within the existing capstone courses in the various departments. Faculty participation is critical, and has been an obstacle in the project. Recently, a call for proposals for mini-grants to revitalize the project has yielded significant interest in building the program. After considering the success of the IPPD program at the University of Florida, the original directors of the program believe that a critical observation is that the corporate sponsors were undercharged, and will in the future be asked to donate enough to make the program viable.
The Quality Improvement Partnerships initiative was a direct result of the 1991 Milliken Total Quality Management University Challenge (ALLEN et al., 1994). The initiative is a cooperative industry/university venture, initially formed between Milliken and three North Carolina universities, North Carolina A&T State University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Since its inception, other universities and other corporations have been engaged (SHELNUTT, 1995). The program participants take a preparatory course that teaches them total quality management methods, team building skills, and communication skills. Among the tools used to spur team-building processes was the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (SHELNUTT, 1996). The course is followed by a summer internship, where all the students on a team have internships with the same company (RUST et al., 1995). The need for the course, given in the spring semester preceding the internship, was recognized after a pilot program that only included the summer internships. The course materials have been published through a grant from Procter and Gamble, and a videotape version of the course was developed as well. Although the cost to participating companies has been greater than that of some of the other approaches (the full cost of internships for all team members plus faculty stipends can exceed $60,000), there has been a clear return on investment and repeat participation. A team assigned to the Burlington Denim Plant improved a bottleneck process of denim dyeing from 36 to 40 feet per minute, accruing a $1.2M annual benefit to that one plant for an investment of $50K.
The Virtual Corporation was founded in fall 1997, headquartered in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. Two ”subsidiaries” were formed—the Personal Electric Rapid Transit Systems (PERTS) and the Distributed Information Systems Corporation (DISC). PERTS focused on the evaluation of possible innovations in high-speed ground transportation. In the 1997-1998 academic year, students developed a 20-foot-long, microprocessor-controlled prototype of an electric propulsion system using a switched-reluctance linear actuator - a proprietary development and the first of its kind. DISC’s mission is to develop a medical imaging database in a partnership with the Maryland/Virginia Regional College of Veterinary Medicine. The DISC product is also likely to have wide application in human hospitals. The current system is being designed using an innovative three-tiered relational database structure, and will integrate data ranging from paper notes to real-time monitoring images with on-site hospital and remote access for veterinarians (History of the Virtual Corporation, 1999).
The pilot program had 50 students, and participation has tripled since that time. Students who participate in the Virtual Corporations program receive credit according to their academic standing. The majority of the students in the Corporation are of an engineering or business background, but students from a number of other disciplines participate as well. Students can participate in the Virtual Corporations program for up to three years, so the course is vertically integrated, and allows students with increasing experience the chance to move up to larger roles within the virtual corporation. The corporation also provides faculty within an academic structure within which to grow inter- and cross-disciplinary collaborations, i.e., it provides a continuing home for collaborative teaching experiments in design.
This Clemson University approach provides sophomore students an introduction to multidisciplinary design through a semester-long design project. The course has been offered as the first course in the Industrial Engineering curriculum, but students from other disciplines take the course as well. This early introduction to design is aimed to have an early payoff: the criteria used to choose new projects ensures a quick and effective local interaction, so that project impact closely follows student effort. These criteria include: the project must address a local need on campus or in town, must fill a niche not currently addressed, can be constructed/solved by team members, and has a reasonable chance of being implemented. Example projects cited were designing and implementing a campus walking/jogging loop, design and construction of a departmental web site, design of maintenance procedures for the campus laundry facility, and design of a tour space for prospective engineering students. Writing and speaking fit naturally into the syllabus, and nominal group techniques were effective in ascertaining areas of student satisfaction, as well as areas for improvement. In addition to this feedback, questionnaires were used to assess student satisfaction with various aspects of the experience. In no case were students less satisfied with the new approach than with the traditional approach (GREENSTEIN, 1995a,b).
Table 2. Satisfaction compared to traditional: 1=much less, 5=much more satisfied.
|
Fall 92 |
Spring 93 |
Fall 93 |
Spring 94 |
Fall 94 |
|
|
Atmosphere |
3.5 |
4.2 |
3.7 |
4.0 |
4.0 |
|
Balance |
3.3 |
3.5 |
3.3 |
3.6 |
3.9 |
|
Communication of Knowledge |
3.5 |
4.2 |
3.7 |
4.2 |
4.3 |
|
Knowledge Gained |
3.8 |
4.2 |
3.8 |
4.4 |
4.4 |
|
Ability to Apply Knowledge |
3.9 |
4.2 |
3.6 |
4.5 |
4.3 |
|
Writing |
3.3 |
3.3 |
3.1 |
3.0 |
3.2 |
|
Speaking |
3.2 |
3.6 |
3.7 |
3.8 |
4.0 |
|
Design |
3.9 |
4.4 |
4.0 |
4.2 |
4.2 |
A significant benefit of having developed a variety of approaches to address the inclusion of multidisciplinary design in the curriculum is that certain practices can be identified as important or essential. The non-essential features of the different approaches provide the variation necessary to satisfy each university’s need to design a program that fits its mission and stimulate the imagination of its faculty.
It is clear that planning is an important step in introducing a new multidisciplinary design program into the curriculum. A pilot program may be necessary to identify changes in the program design before attempting to accommodate a large number of students. Even when a program is successful, it is not likely to be possible to scale it up to include all engineering students, for reasons such as cost, space, and faculty availability. Since no one program can provide all engineering students at an institution with the multidisciplinary design experience they need, more than one approach to fulfilling that need must be considered, including some multidisciplinary experiences that do not cross departmental borders.
Both horizontal integration across disciplines and vertical integration through academic class are important and representative of the workplace. In industry, our graduates will not only work with co-workers from a variety of disciplines, but they will also work with people with wide-ranging levels of experience and education. Adding vertical integration to multidisciplinary experiences is therefore important.
Industry involvement is not essential in multidisciplinary experiences earlier in the curriculum, such as Clemson’s Cross-Disciplinary Education in User-Centered Design. In experiences later in the curriculum, especially capstone experiences, industry involvement is a critical way to ensure that the experience is truly representative of what the students will encounter in the workplace. Corporate sponsorship is also an important source of funding for these special experiences. Designing a program that provides the company an immediate return on its investment will ensure repeat sponsors.
Faculty incentives are critical to success. Even in cases where the multidisciplinary design course substitutes for a traditional capstone design course, there is normally an added faculty burden to coordinate with faculty in other departments and to advise a more diverse group of students. As a result, it is important that benefits to the faculty member are built into the design of the program. Such incentives may be directly financial, or may include developing a relationship for future consulting with a company, and may take a variety of other forms.
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