System Design Projects for Seniors

The use of system design projects in the education of senior engineering students is discussed. In an experiment with such a project at the University of Iowa, students learned many technical and human lessons by partitioning the assigned class project into small subsystem problems, designing and building the subsystems, solving the interface problems, and testing the overall project. This kind of system experience is a natural extension of the typical freshman design course in which students learn to solve problems in groups. Here the more sophistocated skills of the seniors are incorporated into the individual group designs, and there is the additional incentive of maidng the individual projects work together to achieve a goal common to the entire class.