Alaeddin S. A. Abu-Abed, Ph.D.,

IEEE Senior Member

 

Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering

Department of Engineering and Physics

University of Central Oklahoma

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Syllabus

Welcome

Welcome to ENGR 4882/4892 or, as I prefer to call it, "Real World Engineering 1&2 for Future Engineers". I am not kidding. If I do my job, after these courses you should come away with the feeling that what was done prepared you for a job as an engineer.  ENGR 4882/4892 is the senior capstone design course sequence in the Department of Engineering and Physics at the University of Central Oklahoma. Teams of three to five students work for two semesters on an engineering design project sponsored internally or externally by a local company. Projects are advised by the UCO Engineering and Physics faculty and, in the case of externally sponsored projects, by engineers from the sponsoring companies. The course culminates in the Final Project Presentations where the teams show off their work in a public forum and are evaluated by a professional engineers from local companies. The main objective of the course is for students to practice engineering design by completing a real-world design project. A second objective is to return value to the client through the delivery of a completed product. 

Description

This course sequence is the capstone class required of all senior engineering physics and biomedical engineering students. "Capstone" because it draws on all of your other engineering and physics courses. The Senior Design Engineering Design course is NOT a paper exercise.  All problems must have a significant design component, must require knowledge from the students’ disciplines to complete, and requires actually building or fabricating a device, apparatus, system, process, etc.   The students are allowed to seek help from any and all sources and must consider multiple designs before selecting and pursuing an approach.  You will go through an open-ended design project experience similar to what you can expect on your job, following graduation. 

Put yourself in the shoes of a design engineer working in industry. Consider your project adviser(s) to be your manager(s). They will approach you with the need for your team to develop a new product or process for them. This should be an exciting experience. However, the situation may feel uncomfortable at first, as it will differ substantially from most of your prerequisite classes which were more formal. In this course there is no solution in the back of the textbook and not even your team faculty adviser knows the optimal answer. They have contracted you to find it!

You may initially find it unnerving if you ask your advisers what to do next, and they reply, “I don’t know, you figure it out!” Or you may ask your advisers if your calculations are correct, and they reply, “I don’t know, you have to convince me!” But that is life for working scientists and engineers; no answer exists at the back of any text for an open-ended design problem. Your managers may not even have the technical expertise to validate your models. Nevertheless, you have to convince them that your work is correct.

There will be a minimal number of  lectures  in the course that will present a formal process for design that we expect all teams to follow, regardless of your specific project topic. This includes writing a product specification, generating multiple solution concepts, selecting an optimal concept, and developing the best concept in detail. This process will give you the means to prove quantitatively to your advisers that your design is the best possible. Competing in a global economy requires such a process.

Learning effective project management, team work and group coordination is an important objective of ENGR 4882/4892. While you might be able to deliver a good design without considering how the project is managed or how to effectively use every team member, the final product , (and your grade) will be much better and your time will be more efficiently spent, if good management principles are followed.

This course sequence is a writing-intensive class. This means you will do a substantial amount of engineering writing and will get a chance to revise some of your engineering writing. In addition, the quality of your engineering writing will factor into your final grade. Whether formal, informal, draft or final, please pay attention to your writing. Most importantly, think of the audience and purpose each time your fingers reach for the keyboard.

You are likely taking this class during final year as an undergraduate. You are expected to apply all those modeling and analysis skills that you have developed in your previous classes. For example, if your product involves some sort of structure, those beam models that you learned in ENGR 2033 and ENGR 2143 are likely relevant. You are expected to support your project with all appropriate analyses, and document them in your final report. This will help you to earn a high course grade.

Your project adviser will probably not tell you what analysis to apply, but rather will expect you to determine when analysis is needed and what analysis to use. In any event, your adviser will expect you to know what you are talking about. Look for opportunities to put your background classes to work for you. Your team might also assign some of your members to learn more about certain technical subjects to properly appraise your designs.

Project Team

Project teams are typically three to four students.  Your team will always have a team leader, a position that rotates monthly among the members of your team. The responsibilities of the team leader includes:

1. Scheduling and running effective team meetings, which means creating an agenda, keeping the meeting on track, and ensuring that all voices are heard. 

2. Seeing that brief minutes are taken at each team meeting. (A note taker can be assigned this important task.)

3. Submitting a record of all team meetings using the course meeting log form. 

4. Seeing that team purchase requisitions have all required authorization signatures and submitting the completed requisition to the Engineering and Physics Department Lab manager..

5. Collecting all team members weekly reports and submitting them at the weekly class meeting.

Time Commitment

You are expected to spend approximately three hours outside class for every hour scheduled in class.  This is scheduled for three hours a week, so the total expected time commitment outside of class is 9 hours per week or 135 hours for the 15 week semester. You are required to attend the entire regular class meeting time from 1:00-3:50 PM on Tuesday afternoon. The course does not have an imposed structure like most. How you invest your hours will depend on your project. Be cautious about letting time slip away early in the semester because the end seems far away. You should be nearly completed with a thorough concept selection process by the time of the midterm, including some modeling and prototyping. You are advised to police your time to make sure you are dedicating yourself at an appropriate level for each of the 15 weeks.

Meeting Time

CRN 12333: Tuesday: 1:00-3:50 PM, Howell Hall 101

             CRN 19566: Thursday: 1:00-3:50 PM, Howell Hall 101

My email address is aabuabed@uco.edu.  You can telephone me at my office at 974-5934. My telephone has voice mail, but I am not very good at checking it regularly so it is probably better to contact me by email which I do check regularly.

My official office hours: MW: 05:00-06:00 PM and T: 04:00-05:00 PM in my office (Howell Hall 221S). Other times by mutual arrangement (email to arrange).

Official hours are as listed above, but I am usually around most of the time whenever I am not teaching class or at other scheduled meetings. Please feel free to come by any time especially if you want to talk about ENGINEERING.

 

Contacting Instructor

Documents and Forms

Syllabus:  The official course syllabus for ENGR 4882 (Senior Engineering Design I) is given here.

2015-2016 Projects List: This year's list of possible projects including a brief description is given here.

Project Initialization & Approvals Form:  Projects for the Senior Design course must be approved by the faculty adviser(s) of the student team members' project and by the Senior Design Coordinator.  The criteria for approval are described in the Project Guidelines document.  To start a project each team must complete and have all the appropriate signatures on the Project Initialization and Approvals Form.  Various course deliverables require Project Sponsor signature(s) and approvals as they come due on  this form as well.  If your project deviates from the Project Guidelines document, you must complete and have all the appropriate signatures on the Project Exceptions Form.

Projection Proposal Form:  The initial project proposal Form is submitted using the Project Proposal Form.

Team Meeting Log Form:  Each team meeting must be reported, as scheduled, on the  Team Meeting Log Form.

Literature Research:  The literature search for your projects is reported on the Literature Research Form.

Weekly Progress Report:  A weekly report is required of all students in the course using the Weekly Report Form.

Seminar Reports: A report on each Talk/Colloquium/Seminar attended is required of all students in the course using the Seminar Signoff/Report Form.

Science Fair Reports: In engineering, like most professions, it is expected that service to society, the community, and the profession is part of one's duties as a professional engineer.  As a service learning project, the senior design class this year is to help assist in the running and judging of the regional science fair held at UCO.  A report on your experience helping at the Science Fair is required of all students in the course using the Science Fair Report Form. 

Notebook: Every student is required to keep a senior design project notebook recording all of their project work. Notebook instructions is given here. The ability to document a project in a notebook will serve you well when you are out in the real world working as a scientist or engineer. Notebooks must be sewn-bound (no spiral notebooks) with consecutively numbered pages (you may have to add the page number yourself). Record in your notebook anything and everything associated with your project - ideas, thoughts, sketches, computer programs, derivations, graphs, data, website URLs, printouts - dated and thoroughly documented. Your notebook will be evaluated by your faculty advisor and the course coordinator twice or three times each term. The notebook will be evaluated using the Notebook Evaluation Form. which is provided for your information and reference (and hopefully to improve your notebook skills). Failure to keep and submit a project notebook will result in a grade of “F” for the course.

NSPE Code of Ethics:  It is expected that all Senior Design Students are familiar with and adhere to the NSPE Engineering Code of Ethics available at this link.  See also the IEEE Code of Ethics, the ASME Code of Ethics, and the BMES Code of Ethics.

Purchasing of Supplies:  All supplies and equipment purchases for Project must be requested using the p. 

Project Management Tools:  An Excel Template for making a Gantt Chart is provided as a starting point: Excel Gantt Chart Template.

Final Project Report:  Some general guidelines and formats for written reports required in this course are given in the Final Project Report Elements document. 

Project Poster:  Some general guidelines for posters are given in the Poster Guidelines document.  You must use the following template for your senior design project poster:  Senior Design Project Poster Template.

Exit Interview:  During ENGR 4892 (Senior Design II)  each Senior Engineering Design student will need to make an appointment to meet with Dr. Bingabr for an exit interview (to be discussed in SD II).  Prior to coming to the interview you will need to download and complete the survey and submit it electronically via email to Dr. Abuabed at aabuabed@uco.edu and Dr. Bingabr at mbingabr@uco.edu:    Exit Interview Survey Form.

Lecture Slides

The updated slides for all course lectures are provided below after they are presented in class. 

FE Handbook