Is It Senior Design Or A High Tech Start Up

The Senior Design course taken near the end of an engineer’s undergraduate tenure is increasingly recognized as a “capstone” activity, enabling these future professionals to apply their collegiate education and experience in a team environment to solving real world problems or to creating new capabilities. Ideally, Senior Design teams are also cross-functional, to broaden the projects and better replicate the professional world. In addition, there is a growing interest in linking Senior Design with entrepreneurial activities, even to the point of commercializing promising project results. The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Florida Tech has structured its senior design course sequence to replicate many of the activities that would be appropriate for a start-up venture, or a corporate product line introducing a new suite of products. In addition to the traditional preliminary and critical design reviews and a demonstration of the completed project, students learn about the industrial new product pipeline and generate feasibility studies, business plans, prototyping, validation reviews, and launch collateral to support a “market introduction” of their product. Senior Design culminates with a public “trade show” held as a feature of the University’s spring Open House for the families of interested high school students. Most of the teams span multiple departments, and this year one team spans two universities and two others are contemplating commercializing their products, utilizing Florida Tech’s new business accelerator, Florida TechStart. Background The Florida Institute of Technology (aka Florida Tech) is a private university of about 3500 students located in Melbourne, on the high technology “Space Coast” of Florida, about 30 miles south of Cape Canaveral. The principal component of the university is the College of Engineering (CoE), which harbors about half of the total enrollment. The CoE offers both undergraduate and graduate programs. Within the College of Engineering are seven departments: Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering Systems, Marine and Environmental Systems, and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. All of the departments except Engineering Systems, which currently only offers graduate programs, require their students to participate in Senior Design as part of their program core curricula. Each department managed their own senior design courses, and there was no formal or systematic interaction between the departments in this regard. The Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department senior design course sequence comprised two consecutive courses taken during the senior year, in which students formed teams and took on engineering projects designed to exercise their technical, practical and teamwork skills. Most of the project teams would contain a mix of electrical and computer engineering P ge 919.1 Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering Education students. A few of the teams would span engineering departments at the university. For instance, there would always be a Mechanical Engineering vehicle team (formula race car, baja car, etc.) which needed electrical and computer engineering skills to develop gauge clusters, computer control systems, wiring harnesses, virtual dashboards, and so forth. There would always be an Aerospace Engineering plane or rocket project which needed electrical and computer engineering skills for data acquisition/analysis, communication, command and control systems. Beginning in the Fall of 2002, several significant changes, decisions and events occurred in rapid succession and have had a dramatic positive impact on the nature and quality of the senior design program in the ECE Department and throughout the College of Engineering: • The ECE senior design course context was changed to emulate a start-up enterprise • Over $40,000 in NCIIA funding was acquired to support certain types of senior design teams • The senior design course instructors across the College of Engineering elected to selforganize to better coordinate their courses, forming the Senior Design Coordinating Committee (SDCC) • The School of Management elected to actively participate and support the senior design experience in the College of Engineering • The ECE Department senior design course sequence was extended by a semester, to be three semesters in length • The SDCC sponsored the first Student Design Day, a “trade show” at which all CoE senior design projects were put on public display in the gymnasium • The first multi-university ECE senior design team was formed • The first ECE senior design team decided to commercialize its project results • The College of Engineering and School of Management collaborated to set up Florida TechStart, a business accelerator for the university • The School of Management established the first general ledger for all CoE senior design teams, greatly improving financial management in this area Context for the ECE Senior Design Sequence of Courses Florida Tech was formed entrepreneurially in 1958 to provide much needed continuing education opportunities for the engineers working at NASA and related space companies at Cape Canaveral. The entrepreneurial spirit and culture at Florida Tech has continued up to the present. When a new professor took over the senior design course sequence, after spending a quarter of a century in industry, the architecture of the courses immediately took on a “new look”. At the first class, the students are told that they have been recruited from college into a new start-up (a fictitious, “Florida Tech Ventures, LLC”), and that they have until April of the following year to form teams and conceive, define, design, develop, prototype, build, characterize, validate and prepare to launch a suite of new products, to be displayed at an all-important trade show. The students learn about the new product pipeline, technology roadmapping, business planning, the product-to-market cycle, design-for-X, project planning, management, execution and closure, and the whole product concept, including the development of launch collateral and participation in trade show events. Page 919.2 Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering Education As part of the venture ambiance, “Classes” were replaced with “all hands meetings”. “Lectures” were replaced with OJT (On the Job Training). The “instructor” became the start-up’s President, CEO, CTO and CSO. The “graduate teaching assistant” assigned to the course became the COO, CFO, Chief Scientist and Lab Director. A simple management hierarchy was installed, and there were meetings with the project leaders to discuss management as well as project and technical topics. The goal of putting the course sequence into this context has been to make our graduates as “plug ‘n play” as possible. The value proposition slogan for Florida Tech engineering has evolved to be that “you can learn engineering at a number of places; you do engineering at Florida Tech”. (For example, our ECE students design and build their own computers as freshmen.) We routinely survey recent graduates and also their employers, and over the next few years will determine if this strong industrial, entrepreneurial flavor to senior design does shorten the time for new college grad employees to become productive in their careers. Senior Design Course Content It became apparent that in this context, the amount of technical and programmatic material handled in the senior design sequence was so great that it was adding technical and schedule risk to the successful completion of many of the projects. Project teams which needed to secure external funding to support the materials and services needed to be purchased for their projects were even more pressed for time. The current run rate for project expenses across the College of Engineering is about $100,000 per year. Most of this money comes from grants and external sponsors and donors for the projects, and most of the sponsors and donors must be discovered or cultivated annually by the teams needing the funding. On this basis, it was decided to add a semester to the ECE senior design sequence of courses. The sequence now begins in the spring semester of the junior year and proceeds through both semesters of the senior year. The junior design course is a one credit course, and the two senior design courses are three credits each. Junior design includes project and team selection and culminates with a preliminary business plan and a display of the emerging project at the Student Design Day trade show. The first semester senior design course is the semester for design, ending approximately with the Critical Design Review (CDR). The second semester senior design course is the semester for building, validating the product, preparations for a launch, and a display of the finished product at the Student Design Day trade show. New high tech start-ups often have the attributes of a skunkworks, with virtually no structure or documented systems for getting things done. On the other hand, an expanding product line in a corporate setting often has a surplus of structure and documented systems and procedures to follow. The ECE senior design course sequence emulates a hybrid of these two environments, to prepare the students for participation in either. More succinctly put, we expose the students to detailed systems, then relax them in practice somewhat to encourage creativity and also to account for the fact that this experience is superimposed on typically four or five other courses the students are taking, plus all of the other senior year activities and events.