January 2022
Featured Article
Senior Design: Showcase vs Competition vs Conference
By: Lawrence Overzet, University of Texas at Dallas
Introduction:
This is now the third article about the ExCEllence in Senior Design Showcase (ESD Showcase). The first article described the great encouragement which resulted from the inaugural event. (https://www.ecedha.org/ECE-Resources/ECE-Source-eNewsletter/August-2019/Inaugural-ExCEllence-in-Senior-Design-Showcase) We have even established multi-institution senior design projects out of that event. The second article described our pivot in April 2020 from an in-person showcase to a mini workshop for reasons that unfortunately remain all too obvious. (https://www.ecedha.org/ECE-Resources/ECE-Source-eNewsletter/September-2020/ExCEllence-in-Senior-Design-Mini-Workshop) We organized a fully remote ESD Showcase in May of 2021. It went very well even though everyone wished it could have been in-person. In this article, I am hoping to pique your interest in what benefits your programs could reap from this event and stoke your desire to join in.
First an Announcement:
An MOU outlining the transfer of control of the ESD Showcase to ECEDHA was signed this past fall. This is exciting news because the ESD Showcase now belongs to ECEDHA! (That is to say: “It belongs to US!”) Ownership enables us to decide how this event will propagate and grow. We get to determine what benefit(s) we want to reap from holding events on senior design. I was struck, 5 years ago, that there was nothing for ECE students in senior design. Nothing. The ASME holds an annual competition (which UT Dallas regularly wins) and there is a capstone conference (which UT Dallas will host this June) but there is nothing focused on ECE students. The ESD Showcase has become the only event focused on ECE students. I and the first ESD Teams have worked hard to keep this event firmly under our control. So, the question to ask and answer is simply this: What helps our programs best? I’m going to argue that a _Showcase_ best meets our needs at the regional level and that we might also consider adding competition at the national/international level. Your thoughts and insights on this are important.
Advantages of the 3 models:
The three models (Showcase, Competition, Conference) each have their significant strengths and are not mutually exclusive. There can be some (carefully controlled?) overlap too.
- A Conference on senior design in ECE would allow our education focused faculty members to make presentations, share information and publish conference papers. This is exactly what occurs at the Capstone Conference (http://capstonedesigncommunity.org/). Prospective authors submit 4-page manuscripts to be published after peer review. This can help faculty members teaching senior design and indirectly help the students as well.
- A Competition in senior design brings with it the joy and glory of winning. Many of us believe that competition brings out the best in us and our industrial colleagues certainly engage in competition. Seeing how your best team competes against those of other schools brings a certain gravitas to an event. It feels a bit like sports and can bring some glory to a small fraction of our schools (assuming a decent social media campaign).
- A Showcase would be designed to impress attendees with the impact ECE students have on societal good and with the array of things which ECE students get to do. Students gain experience in making presentations and show-off their projects to the best of their abilities. Awards can be given out, but there is an important sense in which every school leaves a winner because the breadth of ECE as a discipline is on display.
Four Issues a Showcase Addresses Best:
My opinion is that regional showcases will serve our needs the best. This is because I think that four major issues facing ECE can be best helped through effective showcases. The first is that I find senior design instructors in ECE can be quite isolated. Even the best prepared instructors can wonder if their program compares well with those of other schools and what insights might be available to them. Leading Senior Design can pose challenges very different from other courses so those instructors can use both connections and help. Conferences could help but showcases will do better. Actual projects get presented at showcases and from a variety of schools enabling one to see at a glance the types of things going on within a full region. The “theory” and focus on publication give way to highlighting the important details and implementation. Competitions can help but showcases will do better too. Smaller and younger programs can feel intimidated by competitions and as a result drop out. Better funded and bigger programs can dominate competitions even unintentionally; but smaller and younger programs can feel welcome and even awarded at a showcase. The focus there is less on comparison and more on celebration of accomplishments. All our programs have something in senior design which can be shown off and celebrated.
The second issue is that ECE remains poorly understood today. Ask Joe on the street what CS grads do and he has a ready answer: Programming and AI. Or ask Josette about Mechanical Engineering and she replies Robotics. But ask people about what ECE grads do and nothing in particular comes to mind. (I almost wish that we could buy a Family Feud Question so Steve Harvey would ask “Name 8 things which Electrical and Computer Engineers work on. Survey said!”) ECE has been foundational to so many technologies; but as a result, has no one thing burned into the minds of the general public today. Showcases can start to turn that around if we do them intentionally. We can begin to better touch the hearts and minds of the public by sending our best teams to show off the projects they’ve accomplished and celebrating those accomplishments both in-person and in social media. While a competition focuses on celebrating the winners, a showcase can focus on celebrating the accomplishments. The difference might be important.
The third thing is ABET visits. Each of us gets visited and the focus of that visit often comes to rest on senior design. A showcase can have awards given to projects best exemplifying each of the ABET Student Outcomes (SOs). Competitions can too, obviously, but the focus on finding the best might limit one to giving multiple awards to a single project. (They were the best in “so many ways”.) A showcase might limit the awards to 1 per team and distribute those awards so that most of the teams are celebrated for a specific kind of accomplishment. Then, when ABET visits occur, awards from regional showcases help to demonstrate the success of the program in various fashions.
The final thing is the stagnating enrollment in EE. ECEDHA has been struggling with how to best push forward ECE programs to our broader community for several years now. While coordination in advertising is good, coordinating it with an event (such as a showcase, conference or competition) ought to work even better. Enabling high school students to see what they could be accomplishing in 4 short years in our ECE programs could work exponentially better.
A National Competition Too?:
If we do have regional showcases, I would propose that we also organize a national (or even international) competition too. I haven’t thought this one through very thoroughly, but I wonder if each regional showcase were to choose one project (or a couple of them) to go on to a national competition. The “ECEDHA Design Awards” or maybe “ECEDHA World Changers” (or some infinitely better name). The options here are so many they can be daunting. They go from teams presenting their projects again to a “design hack-a-thon” like thing (where the teams work on solving some inspiring sort of challenge put to them by a group of visionary tech junkies over the course of a sleepless weekend) or something much more creative and entrepreneurial and eye-catching. The spoils go to the winners.
Summary:
ECE is foundational to our world’s progress and yet we find ourselves in a time where ECE programs need a “shot in the arm.” (The Covid pun is intentional.) I propose that regional showcases can serve as that boost. ESD Showcases can provide a viable reason for our programs to interact and help us to learn from each other. They can help our faculty members teaching senior design to connect in meaningful and beneficial fashions. They enable awards and celebrations of all that is the best in our capstone programs but do so in fashions that help to build up _ALL_ of our programs and colleagues.
