Integrating Environmental Impact and Globalization into Senior Capstone Courses in Mechanical Engineering

This Innovative Practice paper describes assessment done in a senior project course at San José State University (SJSU). Today, environmental justice and environmental impact have been clearly elevated in its importance in engineering education by its reference in several current ABET Student Outcomes. This paper discusses the integration of an assignment in environmental impact into the mechanical engineering (ME) senior project course sequence. This study looks at student achievement data in Spring 2019 and Spring 2020. In this article, we compare the student achievement of the SLO related to environmental impact as well as analyze the essays of students from Spring 2019 and Spring 2020. As our assessment results show, most students either met or exceeded the criteria for this assignment in the ME senior project class. Over the past two years, 311 students (89%) either met or exceeded the criteria for this assignment out of the 346 students.