27-401 Capstone I

Location: Pittsburgh

Units: 12

Semester Offered: Fall

This is the first of two courses that together fulfill the Capstone requirement. This capstone course introduces the student to the methodology used for projects and teams based research as practiced in the Materials Science and Engineering workplace. This is a project course that requires the knowledge relationship among processing, structure, and performance to address an important contemporary problem in materials science and engineering. Student taking this course will work in a team environment to complete a design project to resolve scientific and engineering issues relating to materials. Research topics will be selected from a list of material problems or research concepts generated from companies or academia - industry research partnerships. This course will establish the research goals, review applicable research methodologies, introduce project management skills and discuss ethical concepts as teams assemble and set their research directions. On the topic selected, the work product is a report that provides clear definition of the problem being addressed, sets out a methodology for the research, includes a literature review, and reports early experimentation results and provides recommendations for future work.