A plan for curricular integration of interdisciplinary design

For many engineering students at Iowa State University College of Engineering, the only design experience previous to the capstone course occurred in a freshman graphics/design course. Unfortunately there is often a void between the freshman course and the senior capstone course. A plan is outlined to fill that void. The goals of the plan outlined are: (1) to provide for a multidisciplinary senior capstone design course; (2) to secure industrial involvement in providing projects and sponsoring teams; (3) to integrate design more fully into the four-year curriculum (4) to develop a practice-oriented Master of Science degree by involving master level students with capstone teams; and (5) to have each student develop a design toolbox of knowledge, experience, hardware, and software during the four-year curriculum. These goals and this plan grew out of the recent experiences in the capstone design course in the electrical and computer engineering department. The plan and experiences leading to its proposal are discussed