Senior Capstone Course

Note: unlike the other BUILD courses, this is a new course and has not yet been developed and run in pilot programs.

Students generally take this course during their senior year. Taught primarily by expert mentors from manufacturing industries, it expands on their substantial BUILD experience, focusing on national and international manufacturing.

During this course the students manage two complex manufacturing projects. One project centers on high reliability manufacturing, such as a medical-grade product, while the other on high-volume, cost-effective manufacturing. Students investigate the differences between production in the United States, in North America more broadly, and overseas production, learning how to set up local manufacturing operations to complete effectively on a global scale.

Ideally these projects are sponsored by and run by local industry. Of course this depends on the needs of the local community and preferences of the school.

Like traditional capstone courses, this course fosters close partnerships with industry sponsors. The expectations and rewards, however, are very different for the students and sponsors. In a traditional Capstone course, the students are expected to develop a product with minimal guidance. In such programs, typically, they barely make it to the engineering prototype phase. In this program, they will instead be guided through the process by experienced mentors. BUILD students by this point already have substantial experience carrying a design much further than those in traditional programs, and are expected to carry the project through the manufacturing stage giving the sponsor something truly useful to them. We are expecting a relatively large percentage of students to get hired by their sponsors.

In this senior course, the student teams learn and demonstrate how to move a project from prototype into a manufacturable product. Substantial focus will be placed on Designing For Manufacturability and moving their prototypes into production. They will learn how to send a PCB to a board-house for manufacturing and to collaborate with firms to make injection-molded parts. They will learn how to produce products in the United States and abroad, and to work with and understand how to set up manufacturing plants.

Students work as engineering teams with mentors, potentially from a sponsoring company, to develop and manufacture an actual product. At this point in their academic careers, BUILD students are able to function as full-performance engineering teams able to provide meaningful work for sponsors and prospective employers. This should, in turn, make the program attractive to additional prospective sponsors.

In all of these courses the students are actively involved in designing, testing, and building useful machines which not only fulfill learning objectives for these courses, but support learning in their other courses as well. With their Freshman 3D printer machine, they can make and test parts and iterate mechanical, civil, thermal, materials, and a host of other designs. With their Sophomore machines, they can produce a functional PCB in a few hours. This capability is vital in today’s context, where modern packaging no longer allows for traditional methods like breadboards and protoboards, and producing custom circuit boards is necessary.

Summary: What’s in this for you?

In this fourth course in your senior (!!!) year you will put into practice everything you’ve worked hard to learn to manufacture a product. Your team will get a real requirement from a real company (which can be yours if you want!) and bring it through two full manufacturing cycles - one domestics and one overseas. You’re now working as a full performance engineer.