Improve the Learning Factory Capstone Experience

Overview

The PSU Learning Factory is located in State College, PA and over the years The PSU Learning Factory has put approximately 13,000 engineering students from Penn State through the capstone project experience. The PSU Learning Factory Capstone experience has been a big contributor to not only providing industry experience to up-and-coming engineers, but also in supplying students with a hands-on experience for executing a project from start to finish.

Objectives

Conducting research in all the different facets of the Learning Factory will translate to creating suggestion to improve the capstone experience, and ultimately constructing a capstone experience that is beneficial to everyone involved. In order to properly achieve this, the team will break into smaller sub teams to purpose research in their assigned section. The sponsor team’s objective was to reach out to current and past sponsors to collect information about the challenges when sponsoring a capstone project. The student team’s objective was to reach out to current and former students to determine what their capstone experience was like and identify any changes they would like to see be made. The faculty team’s objective was to contact all of the members involved in the capstone then analyze their responses to determine what is and isn’t working well for them. The learning factory team’s objective is to analyze the organization structure, finding information on the sponsor recruiting process, and provide solutions to be a liaison between the sponsor, students, and faculty members.

Approach

The approach used to solve the problem was a design thinking methodology. The early stage of the design thinking consisted of empathizing with main stakeholders (students, faculty, sponsors and the Learning Factory) of this capstone experience and defining the needs and wants of these users. Then, this research was used to ideate and prototype solutions for the identified needs and wants. Once prototyped solutions were generated, there were presented to the students, faculty, sponsors and the Learning Factory in order to validate or void these proposed solutions.

Outcomes

In conclusion, the team has refined the survey and interview information into 2 main deliverables such as strategical prototypes and the future business model. The strategical prototypes include eight prototypes such as CATME group maker, sponsor forms standardization, early student exposure to capstone, standardization of capstone class structure, master schedule, video, evolution of capstone, and social media presence in LinkedIn, Facebook, and updates to the current website. The above-mentioned strategical prototypes are solutions that the team come up with that can be implemented immediately in the capstone process. The future business model will consist of all the lower priority level issues that were identified but the team was unable to make solutions given the time frame.