Senior Design

Congratulations to our Spring 2012 Trade Fair Champions

Overall Trade Fair Champion - Nautical Mines
Kid's Choice Award - Revenge of the Engi-Nerds
Best Essay - Mario Rodriquez

For more information on Trade Fair, chek out the Spring 2013 Program
Trade Fair Program for Apr. 25 includes project synopses and Trade Fair essays.

Wondering what we are up to? View the Elevator Pitch Presentation for current Senior Design Projects. (Coming Soon)

Call for Projects
The Colorado School of Mines Senior Design Program is searching for outstanding challenges for our students. Each year approximately 60 teams of engineering students solve design problems brought to the school by corporations, government agencies and other professional organizations, as well as individual clients. A good project will be technically challenging, required design thinking and be scoped to fit in the two semester course sequence.If you have a challenge, and would like to explore hiring a senior design team, please fill out the Senior Design Project Submittal Form.

About Senior Design

The College of Engineering & Computational Sciences Capstone Design Course is a creative multidisciplinary design experience emerging from combined efforts in civil, electrical, mechanical, and environmental specialties in engineering. Within the engineering community it is widely believed that many of the challenges which are facing practicing engineers, now and in the 21st century, can best be met by exploiting multidisciplinary approaches. This Program in Senior Capstone Engineering Design has been established to demonstrate the value and ingenuity which can be derived from cooperative design efforts among traditional engineering disciplines.

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) defines engineering design:
"Engineering design is the process of devising a system, component or process to meet desired needs. It is a decision-making process (often iterative), in which the basic sciences, mathematics, and engineering sciences are applied to convert resources optimally to meet a stated objective. Among fundamental elements of the design process are the establishment of objectives and criteria, synthesis, analysis, construction, testing and evaluation."

This course has been designed to comply with the ABET guidelines that require the engineering design component of a curriculum to include at least some of the following features:
- development of student creativity
- use of open-ended problems
- development and use of design methodology
- formulation of design problem statements and specifications
- consideration of alternative solutions
- feasibility considerations
- detailed system descriptions

Further, it is essential to include a variety of realistic constraints such as:
- economic factors
- safety
- reliability
- aesthetics
- ethics
- social impact