Capstone Project Wiki

Welcome to Capstone!

We are excited to partner with you this year in 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.

As a Capstone coach you are expected to spend about 6 hours per week on average in your work as a coach. This guide is provided to help you be an excellent coach. Following this guide, the Coach Reference lists items alphabetically by topic that we hope provide information to help you succeed.

To help you in your role as a Capstone coach, we have identified five principles of Capstone coaching. These principles are:

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. So it's important that 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.

• \ref{refchap:HS} in the Coach Reference provides some general hints about successfully mentoring your team members.

Most students have never seen the product development process in either theory or practice. You've been chosen as a coach in large part because you've experienced product development in the real world. You have the opportunity to share your practical experience to help the academic subject come alive to the students.

Mentoring on the Product Development Process discusses specific actions you can take to mentor students in the product development process include:

• Facilitate learning in instructional pods (see \ref{refchap:IP} in the Coach Reference).
• Help students to individually apply the Capstone product development process (see \ref{refchap:DPA} in the Coach Reference).
• Use class terminology in mentoring your students. While this may not be your preferred terminology, it's important to use consistent terminology with all of the students. You can see a summary of the class terminology in Appendixes A and C of the textbook.

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 including:

• \ref{refchap:TTS} in the Capstone Reference discusses the Tuckman stages of team development.
• \ref{refchap:TME} in the Capstone Reference discusses five areas of team member effectiveness.
• \ref{refchap:TM} in the Coach Reference provides some specific suggestions for helping develop strong teams.

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 have to 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. Items that may help in your mentoring include:

• \ref{refchap:MP} in the Coach Reference provides some suggestions for how you can mentor the team in scoping and completing the project.
• \ref{refchap:MC} in the Coach Reference provides some suggestions for helping your team effectively convey the results of their product development work.
• \ref{refchap:SI} in the Coach Reference gives some ideas on how you can work with the sponsor to help the students find success on the project.

Students are working hard to develop as individuals and engineers. Nevertheless, they have many things they struggle with. 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.

Students are learning tremendously as they work in Capstone. The growth that they will have during the year is really quite surprising to 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. It should include feedback on both the project work and individual characteristics that help or hinder their work.

Giving and Receiving Feedback discusses your formal and informal role in providing feedback to team members. Materials that can help you provide effective feedback include the following:

• \ref{refchap:SF} in the Coach Reference discusses the mechanisms we have for coaches providing feedback.
• \ref{refchap:TME} in the Capstone Reference discusses areas of team member effectiveness.
• The Design Skills chapter in the textbook describes skills that team members can bring to the project. These skills may provide opportunities for giving helpful feedback to your team members.

We hope that this guide is helpful in outlining your responsibilities and providing guidelines for your success as a faculty coach. 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 welcome your feedback.