Teaching electrical engineering design: a ten year summary

The authors began teaching the two semester senior design course sequence in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Detroit Mercy in 1984, and have been directly or indirectly responsible for them up to the Summer-1994 semester. It is recognized that there is no single design course structure which will be effective for all engineering programs. Differences in school location, semester or quarter length, cooperative education opportunities, class size, and student preparation all influence the effectiveness of different strategies. Over this time however, a variety of different structures have been tried, with varied degrees of success. The authors believe that they have now determined an organization, which for them, balances the somewhat competing issues of team experience, design complexity, realism, assignment of individual grades, writing content, and faculty workload. They summarize ten years of experience with this two semester design sequence