Academic challenges as part of capstone project resilience training

Abstract

Capstone projects are the projects students undertake during undergraduate studies where they serve as the final gatekeeping process in engineering degrees to ensure students have the ability to leverage all of the knowledge they have gained in the solving of an open ended problem. As part of a larger project to improve the experience of students in a capstone project module, a challenge-based system has been implemented with inspiration taken from the Superbetter approach. This paper introduces the wider project context, presents the three design cycles the challenge system went through and presents results. In this paper it is shown that the implementation of the artefact was ultimately not a success, and the reasons for this are explored and recommendations for the implementation of similar systems in the future in other contexts are presented.