A capstone design project provides students with the chance to work on open-ended, real-world problems of their own choosing. Students should work in teams to design, build, and test a product using the design process and recording their work in the Engineering Design Process Log. By working in teams, students develop leadership, problem solving and communications skills.
During this unit, instructors can choose to allow students the degree of freedom they are comfortable with and that aligns with priorities of the STEM school. They can assign a traditional Capstone Design Project, drawn from challenges proposed by industry sponsors, or allow students to continue to expand and perfect projects from earlier in the school year (e.g. their InVenture Prize invention, or one of their computer science projects). Or they can allow students to design projects related to external competitions, such as the GoBabyGo program that provides modified, ride-on cars to young children with disabilities.
All projects should include all the steps of design, including market research, defining requirements, ideating, prototyping, testing, etc. At the end of the semester, student teams should display and pitch their inventions to a panel of judges, invited guests, peers, administrators, etc.