Capstone Project Wiki

Welcome to Capstone!

Brigham Young University’s Capstone course (Me En/EC En 475 & 476) has gained a reputation as one of the finest student mentoring experiences of its type in the country. Your role as a Faculty Coach is integral to each student’s educational success and helps ensure positive outcomes for the students and for the Capstone course. With your help, we know that this will be a successful year. We are excited to work with you to help these remarkable students become leaders in learning a practical design process while focusing on designing a desirable and transferable product.

We hope that this guide is helpful in outlining your responsibilities and providing guidelines for your success as a faculty coach. Following this guide, the Coach Reference lists items alphabetically by topic that we hope provide information to help you succeed.We look forward to working with you and hope you will enjoy the Capstone course as much as we do.

If you have any suggestions or ideas for improving the course, don’t hesitate to let us know. We want the Capstone program to continually improve and we welcome your feedback.

Principles of Capstone Coaching

To help you in your role as a Capstone coach, we have identified six principles of Capstone mentoring. These principles include mentoring in teams, during the product development process, with effective teamwork, in completing the project, individually, and through feedback.

1. The job of the coach is to mentor the team.

As a Capstone coach, your primary job is to mentor the team and the individuals on the team. Capstone is not primarily about getting the project done; it's about helping the students develop traits that will help them be influential engineers in the future. Therefore, rather than doing the project yourself, you must guide the students to successful completion, which is often much harder. But if you take over, the students don't grow.

It's also important to understand that the coach role is not a passive bystander. You are not a supervisor or an observer of the team. You must be an active mentor, helping the students develop the hard and soft skills needed to excel on the product development project. You must figure out how you can best mentor the students to grow both as a team and as individuals.

2.Students need mentoring in the product development process.

Most students have never seen the product development process in either theory or practice. By sharing your real world experience, you can bring the academic subject to life for the students.

See Mentoring on the Product Development Process for specific actions you can take to mentor students in this period.

3. Students need mentoring in effective teamwork.

Students have worked on teams, but still need mentoring in how to make their teamwork more effective. As an outsider who is intimately familiar with the team operation, you are uniquely qualified to provide teamwork mentoring.

Mentoring in Team Dynamic discusses materials that may be helpful in providing teamwork mentoring.

4. Students need mentoring in completing the project.

Students are used to having specific questions that they answer on their homework and having specific tasks assigned for them to complete in labs. In contrast, on their project, they must decide what needs to be done and how it should be reported. Therefore, they'll need your help to mentor them to successful project completion.

Mentoring the Team Throughout the Project discusses how you might mentor students to help them complete the project.

5. Students need individual mentoring.

Students are working hard to develop as individuals and engineers. As such, they have many things with which they struggle. As their Capstone coach, you are in an ideal place to provide individual mentoring relative to their professional development.

Mentoring Individuals provides some help for this important role.

6. Students need candid and helpful feedback.

Students are learning tremendously as they work in Capstone. The growth they have during the year surprises most of us, even when we've seen it over and over. An important part of helping them to grow is providing candid and helpful feedback. This feedback should include discussing both their strengths and areas where they can improve on both the project work and individual characteristics.

Giving and Receiving Feedback discusses your formal and informal role in providing feedback to team members.