CAPSTONE Definition & Course Philosophy
1. Definition of capstone experience
We define a capstone experience as a culminating student experience in which students apply the STEM concepts that they learn to solve an open-ended, preferably real-life, problem.
2. CAPSULE acronym
CAPSULE stands for CAPStone Unique Learning Experience. This acronym sums up the philosophy of our program and its focus. It embodies the heart of what engineers do best in practice: they design products that serve society and the human race while making a profit along the way. Engineers love to learn scientific concepts and apply them to real-life and real-world problems. This union of abstract concepts with a logical design process is needed to solve sophisticated world problems today. We need to have an understanding of the scientific concepts before we can apply them. This is the philosophy behind CAPSULE.
A capstone experience is guided by the well-know engineering design process (EDP). The EDP helps engineers (and teachers and students who use it) to structure their thinking and activities to solve the open-ended problem at hand in systematic and methodical way.
Our goal and hope is that you will master the EDP and the related capstone experience and then apply it to your teaching in STEM subjects including science (biology, chemistry, physics), math, engineering, and technology. We hope to guide you, and work with you so you learn how to apply the EDP and its tools to STEM subjects at the high school level. We also hope that we will partner together and publish the results of our work in national and international conferences and journals.
3. Professional Development Deliverables
After the two weeks, you will understand the EDP and capstone experience. More specifically, you learn its skill set and tools in Week 1 (CAD, documentation tools, and online tools), and how to apply it in your classroom for your students in Week 2 (instructional design, action plan, and lesson plan). These deliverables equip you with what you need for effective understanding and deployment of the capstone experience. We are confident that you will use it in ways we have never imagined. Thus, we can work together as an effective team and learn from one another.
4. Our Hypothesis
Our hypothesis is that capstone-experience based instruction of STEM subjects is a more effective approach for teaching high school students, and can motivate and excite them about STEM courses and careers. Such methods of instruction also make the students appreciate what they learn and why they learn it, especially the abstract concepts.
During our research for this program, we talked to many high school teachers. One teacher said that he is often faced with students asking “why are we learning this chemistry reaction, what do we do with it?” Our students at the college level ask the same questions all the time. We often approach these questions from an engineer’s perspective. We can find products that use the concepts that we teach in the classroom and show the students the elegance and importance of these concepts when they are applied in real products. We hope to transfer this ability to you so you can use similar tools to help your students understand these difficult concepts in high school.
5. Capstone tools and skill set
We believe that CAD is an important tool for implementing capstone-experience based instruction because it is visual, easy to use, and provides a large set of tools that are suitable and adaptable to all STEM topics. In addition to creating parts and assemblies of real products, CAD offers mass property calculations, analysis (stress and strain), simulation, flow analysis, animation, and manufacturing. The Zeid textbook will be one of your guides to exploring the wide variety of CAD capabilities. Moreover, CAD software is easy to use and available to school systems for free. Our partner, SolidWorks Corporation, gives away its software free to teachers and students.
6. Implementing capstone experience in schools
Implementing the capstone experience in high schools is the most challenging, but rewarding, achievement of CAPSULE. The ultimate goal of is to see this wonderful concept and its tools at work in your classroom with your students. This is where we need your help. In this regard, the success or failure of CAPSULE hinges on your imagination and innovation. We will guide you through all of the materials that are mandated by the Massachusetts Frameworks and we will support you until you succeed in using the capstone experience in your classroom. As a teacher, you know there is nothing more gratifying than when your struggling students come to you and say “we finally got it”. This is the “Aha” moment of the capstone experience that we hope you will achieve.
During the research phase of CAPSULE , we spoke to many teachers and administrators, including Pam Pelletier, Senior Program Director of BPS Science Department, and Jonathon Mclaughlin, BPS Prof, Dev., Specialist. We are fully aware of the many challenges you face: your time constraints, the crowded curriculum, the limited resources in schools, the mobility of students from one school to another, and a host of other issues and challenges that face you as a teacher everyday in the classroom. In addition, we understand that these challenges vary between different school districts.
When designing this program, our CAPSULE team had to first define why we are teaching what we are teaching. You may also begin wondering what you will learn and what you will know at the end of these two weeks.
Our entire CAPSULE program is focused upon understanding, using, and implementing capstone experiences into high school STEM teaching. The capstone experience we will explore in CAPSULE draws from the capstone projects required in many college and university programs. In the CAPSULE program, we hope to draw out the idea that a capstone project is a powerful and exciting experience for many students, one that lends itself to engineering products and problems. We believe that an effective capstone experience can help students understand STEM concepts, see the reason to learn them, and apply them to real-life problems.
We define a capstone experience as a culminating student experience in which students apply the STEM concepts that they learn to solve an open-ended, preferably real-life, problem.
2. CAPSULE acronym
CAPSULE stands for CAPStone Unique Learning Experience. This acronym sums up the philosophy of our program and its focus. It embodies the heart of what engineers do best in practice: they design products that serve society and the human race while making a profit along the way. Engineers love to learn scientific concepts and apply them to real-life and real-world problems. This union of abstract concepts with a logical design process is needed to solve sophisticated world problems today. We need to have an understanding of the scientific concepts before we can apply them. This is the philosophy behind CAPSULE.
A capstone experience is guided by the well-know engineering design process (EDP). The EDP helps engineers (and teachers and students who use it) to structure their thinking and activities to solve the open-ended problem at hand in systematic and methodical way.
Our goal and hope is that you will master the EDP and the related capstone experience and then apply it to your teaching in STEM subjects including science (biology, chemistry, physics), math, engineering, and technology. We hope to guide you, and work with you so you learn how to apply the EDP and its tools to STEM subjects at the high school level. We also hope that we will partner together and publish the results of our work in national and international conferences and journals.
3. Professional Development Deliverables
After the two weeks, you will understand the EDP and capstone experience. More specifically, you learn its skill set and tools in Week 1 (CAD, documentation tools, and online tools), and how to apply it in your classroom for your students in Week 2 (instructional design, action plan, and lesson plan). These deliverables equip you with what you need for effective understanding and deployment of the capstone experience. We are confident that you will use it in ways we have never imagined. Thus, we can work together as an effective team and learn from one another.
4. Our Hypothesis
Our hypothesis is that capstone-experience based instruction of STEM subjects is a more effective approach for teaching high school students, and can motivate and excite them about STEM courses and careers. Such methods of instruction also make the students appreciate what they learn and why they learn it, especially the abstract concepts.
During our research for this program, we talked to many high school teachers. One teacher said that he is often faced with students asking “why are we learning this chemistry reaction, what do we do with it?” Our students at the college level ask the same questions all the time. We often approach these questions from an engineer’s perspective. We can find products that use the concepts that we teach in the classroom and show the students the elegance and importance of these concepts when they are applied in real products. We hope to transfer this ability to you so you can use similar tools to help your students understand these difficult concepts in high school.
5. Capstone tools and skill set
We believe that CAD is an important tool for implementing capstone-experience based instruction because it is visual, easy to use, and provides a large set of tools that are suitable and adaptable to all STEM topics. In addition to creating parts and assemblies of real products, CAD offers mass property calculations, analysis (stress and strain), simulation, flow analysis, animation, and manufacturing. The Zeid textbook will be one of your guides to exploring the wide variety of CAD capabilities. Moreover, CAD software is easy to use and available to school systems for free. Our partner, SolidWorks Corporation, gives away its software free to teachers and students.
6. Implementing capstone experience in schools
Implementing the capstone experience in high schools is the most challenging, but rewarding, achievement of CAPSULE. The ultimate goal of is to see this wonderful concept and its tools at work in your classroom with your students. This is where we need your help. In this regard, the success or failure of CAPSULE hinges on your imagination and innovation. We will guide you through all of the materials that are mandated by the Massachusetts Frameworks and we will support you until you succeed in using the capstone experience in your classroom. As a teacher, you know there is nothing more gratifying than when your struggling students come to you and say “we finally got it”. This is the “Aha” moment of the capstone experience that we hope you will achieve.
During the research phase of CAPSULE , we spoke to many teachers and administrators, including Pam Pelletier, Senior Program Director of BPS Science Department, and Jonathon Mclaughlin, BPS Prof, Dev., Specialist. We are fully aware of the many challenges you face: your time constraints, the crowded curriculum, the limited resources in schools, the mobility of students from one school to another, and a host of other issues and challenges that face you as a teacher everyday in the classroom. In addition, we understand that these challenges vary between different school districts.
When designing this program, our CAPSULE team had to first define why we are teaching what we are teaching. You may also begin wondering what you will learn and what you will know at the end of these two weeks.
Our entire CAPSULE program is focused upon understanding, using, and implementing capstone experiences into high school STEM teaching. The capstone experience we will explore in CAPSULE draws from the capstone projects required in many college and university programs. In the CAPSULE program, we hope to draw out the idea that a capstone project is a powerful and exciting experience for many students, one that lends itself to engineering products and problems. We believe that an effective capstone experience can help students understand STEM concepts, see the reason to learn them, and apply them to real-life problems.
Professional Development
Course Philosophy: The capstone vision utilized in this course is new, unique, and effective. This vision aims to provide teachers with capstone-based teaching pedagogy and tools. In turn, teachers provide their students with capstone-based learning. This unique approach utilizes open-ended problems and projects for classroom teaching. The main benefit of solving these problems and projects is to connect abstract STEM concepts to realty and real-life applications. Thus teachers will be able to more effectively deliver the concepts to students while students are becoming excited about STEM subjects and eventually about STEM careers.
Course Description: This two-week intensive course is aimed at high school teachers who teach STEM subjects including science (physics, chemistry, and biology), mathematics, engineering, and technology. The course immerses teachers in a capstone experience that is based on the engineering design process (EDP) to help them teach their students STEM subjects more effectively in the classroom. The effectiveness of the capstone approach stems from: (1) the open-ended nature of the capstone activities, and (2) helping teachers and students connect the abstract STEM concepts to real-world applications. Teachers learn and practice capstone concepts in Week 1 of the course, and apply the concepts to develop their own instructional plans in Week 2. Topics covered include capstone projects, capstone-based inquiry, relationship between design and manufacturing, product design, product analysis, design tools, hands-on projects, capstone clinics, and design and develop capstone-based classroom pedagogy.
Course Description: This two-week intensive course is aimed at high school teachers who teach STEM subjects including science (physics, chemistry, and biology), mathematics, engineering, and technology. The course immerses teachers in a capstone experience that is based on the engineering design process (EDP) to help them teach their students STEM subjects more effectively in the classroom. The effectiveness of the capstone approach stems from: (1) the open-ended nature of the capstone activities, and (2) helping teachers and students connect the abstract STEM concepts to real-world applications. Teachers learn and practice capstone concepts in Week 1 of the course, and apply the concepts to develop their own instructional plans in Week 2. Topics covered include capstone projects, capstone-based inquiry, relationship between design and manufacturing, product design, product analysis, design tools, hands-on projects, capstone clinics, and design and develop capstone-based classroom pedagogy.