Capstone Innovation Project –Pedagogical Model and Methods

In September 2012, Faculty of Telecommunication and e-business at Turku University of Applied Sciences piloted a new three semester Capstone innovation project course in the framework of Conceive, Design, Implement, and Operate (CDIO), standard 5 –Design-Build- Experiences – understanding of a product and system development. Encouraged by the positive experience from the pilot projects, the course was enlarged in autumn 2013 to apply all students from the following degree programmes: Information and communication technology, Electronics, Business and Library and information services. The innovation project is initiated in multidisciplinary teams of 6-8 mainly 3rd grade students. The course allow students to develop a prototype as a solution to a problem or need of a real client. The project covers the whole life cycle of a product development process from an innovation process to closing the project. The pedagogical framework of the course is in innovation pedagogy, problem based learning (PBL) and project pedagogy. User-centered methods are applied in the planning phase of the project and agile methods, especially scrum, are used in project implementation. This paper presents the experiences from the pilot implementation and the wider implementation started on autumn 2013. The paper details the pedagogical models and methods applied in different phases of the innovation project (idea generation, rapid prototyping, implementation, closing), describes the learning experience and strategies for effective and realistic competence based assessment. The assessment focus is in the learning experience and outcome and project success. The feedback analysis from the pilot course showed that the innovation project was experienced highly motivating, challenging and educating. The aim of this paper is to define pedagogical models and methods that support motivation, learning, team cohesion and collaborative, user-centered development process.

Keywords: Project pedagogy, innovation pedagogy, assessment, innovation project, CDIO, Capstone, engineering education, ICT, scrum.

Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014