Engineering student-design competition teams: Capstone or extracurricular?

Year after year, engineering student-design competitions continue to attract increasing attention from engineering programs across the country. The participation in these competitions is beneficial to both students trying to develop their design and networking abilities, and institutions trying to promote their programs and increase their visibility. Traditionally, the perception has been that the easiest, most straight forward way to participate in a student-design competition is to assign the competition project as a capstone senior design project. This way, a group of seniors work under the supervision of a faculty member to complete the project seeing that the completion is a graduation requirement. The recently emerging alternative is to form an extracurricular team of students whose goal is to exclusively participate in the competition. The extracurricular teams are mostly populated by sophomore and junior level students and driven only by their passion and self motivation rather than a curricular requirement. In this paper, we share our observation and experience to contrast both options and provide some recommendations.