Software Strategies for Team Functionality Support in Capstone Courses

Capstone courses are a vital part of the undergraduate engineering experience. Today's capstones often utilize a mixture of existing and new technical skills that are applied to projects of varying complexity with some level of correlation to real industry applications. The most common form for capstones in engineering are team based, some of which are single discipline while others are multi-disciplinary. Literature on capstone studies have documented how to formulate teams, team group dynamics, and team peer surveys. Given new technology advancements, an area for continued study are strategies for how to have student teams communicate, collaborate and manage their designs with technology. This paper presents a series of trends over a 10-year span on how multi-disciplinary Architectural Engineering (AE) teams collaborated, interfaced and communicated during a yearlong capstone experience by adopting technology as the binding medium. Here, this paper will discuss what software can support the non-technical calculation aspects of a team, how software can be leveraged to promote integration and how to tie software into assignments. When collaboration, communication and management technology is adopted, this study found that student teams are capable of establishing a cohesive and integrated design solutions. This capstone experience was scoped in the context of buildings being used for projects; yet, results presented should be easily translated to other infrastructure-based projects in Civil Engineering (CE).