Stakeholder engagement activities are essential for guiding designers' decision-making throughout their design processes. In capstone courses, engineering student designers practice engaging with stakeholders in preparation for their professional careers. However, understandings of: (1) how engineering students engage stakeholders to inform design…

In this article, the authors contribute to the conversation on High Impact Practice (HIPs) focusing on the connection between sense of accomplishment and what is high impact by discussing data from their study of signature assignments. Signature assignments are assignments within a single course or unit that give students choice, require synthesis…

We have implemented a jigsaw framework in our biomedical engineering capstone design course by overlaying strategic consideration groups across our design teams. Collaboration in design courses is usually focused within a design team with some peer feedback, but opportunities to work across teams are often limited. The purpose of this teaching tip…

Architectural education shares much in common with engineering, including the use of a culminating capstone experience in the final year. The form of this experience varies, with the research-based thesis and final-year project being most common. This paper explores the literature on traditions of enquiry and the meaning of research in various…

This study explores integrating industry-crowdsourced projects within capstone courses of a 4-year Bachelor of Science program at an accredited American university. A unique business consulting model was developed for the final year course, aligning students with 16-weeks industry projects that reflected their academic goals and the program's…

Software assistants have significantly impacted software development for both practitioners and students, particularly in capstone projects. The effectiveness of these tools varies based on their knowledge sources; assistants with localized domain-specific knowledge may have limitations, while tools, such as ChatGPT, using broad datasets, might…

Photovoice is a type of participatory action research in which individuals document their experiences through photography. Through the taking, captioning, and reflecting on photographs that they have taken, participants are able to affect change within their communities. Participants also take part in an interview or focus group about their photos…

Every three years, the Organisation for European Cooperation and Development evaluates the scientific competence of European students. Recent results have demonstrated that scientific competence in Spain is somewhat underdeveloped, which underscores the need to apply educational methodologies that favour the development of said competence. This…

In this study we explored the experiences of students who completed a project-based, interdisciplinary capstone course that was offered at a large university in Southern Ontario, Canada. To do so, we interviewed students after they completed the course, adopting a constructivist perspective and a phenomenological approach. Interview transcripts…