The early stage of the design thinking consisted of empathizing with main stakeholders (students, faculty, sponsors and the Learning Factory) of this capstone experience and defining the needs and wants of these users.

The approach used to solve the problem was a design thinking methodology. The learning factory team’s objective is to analyze the organization structure, finding information on the sponsor recruiting process, and provide solutions to be a liaison between the sponsor, students, and faculty members. The faculty team’s objective was to contact all of the members involved in the capstone then analyze their responses to determine what is and isn’t working well for them. The student team’s objective was to reach out to current and former students to determine what their capstone experience was like and identify any changes they would like to see be made. The sponsor team’s objective was to reach out to current and past sponsors to collect information about the challenges when sponsoring a capstone project. In order to properly achieve this, the team will break into smaller sub teams to purpose research in their assigned section. ObjectivesĬonducting research in all the different facets of the Learning Factory will translate to creating suggestion to improve the capstone experience, and ultimately constructing a capstone experience that is beneficial to everyone involved. The PSU Learning Factory Capstone experience has been a big contributor to not only providing industry experience to up-and-coming engineers, but also in supplying students with a hands-on experience for executing a project from start to finish. The Learning Factory provides a unique opportunity for industry sponsors to partner with Penn State to help educate the next generation of World Class Engineers using state-of-the-art facilities for design, prototyping, and fabrication.The PSU Learning Factory is located in State College, PA and over the years The PSU Learning Factory has put approximately 13,000 engineering students from Penn State through the capstone project experience. Teams of engineering students tackle real-world problems sponsored by clients, challenging students to apply the knowledge and tools acquired during their undergraduate education to help solve engineering problems. Since its inception, the Learning Factory has completed more than 1,800 projects for more than 500 different sponsors, and nearly 9,000 engineering students at Penn State University Park participated in such a project. The Learning Factory provides a University-Industry partnership where student design projects benefit clients and industrial sponsors interact with students and faculty to help us create world-class engineers and make a significant difference in engineering education at Penn State. The Learning Factory provides modern design, prototyping, and manufacturing facilities, including machining (CNC and manual), 3D printing, welding, metrology, and CAD/CAM. Gordon Learning Factory is a hands-on facility for engineering students to use in conjunction with capstone design and other courses, as well as research projects and student organizations. The required project work must be sufficient such that it may be handled by a team of 4-6 students within one 15-week semester. Projects need to have a strong design component with clear, well-defined objectives to provide the students with an ideal starting point and allow them to keep focused. This is an excellent opportunity, for a minimal investment, to investigate the potential for that 'back burner' idea that has been sitting on your desk. The ideal project is the design of a product, process, software, or service that involves technical analysis, financial justification, and prototyping. Having a greater number of projects will give us better opportunities to put together multi-disciplinary teams. One major attraction of teaching the capstone design project through The Learning Factory is the possibility for students to work in multi-disciplinary teams along with, for example, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, and materials engineering students.

Psu learning factory capstone