Collaboration of Technical Editing Students With Mechanical Engineering Seniors in a Capstone Design Course

An innovative capstone design course titled “Design of Fluid Thermal Systems,” involves groups of seniors working on various semester-long design projects. Groups are composed of 3 or 4 members that bid competitively on various projects. Once projects are awarded, freshmen enrolled in the “Introduction to Mechanical Engineering” course are assigned to work with the senior design teams. The senior teams (Engineering Consulting Companies) function like small consulting companies that employ co-operative education students; e.g., the freshmen. In Fall 2006, the Engineering Consulting Companies also worked with students enrolled in a Technical Editing (TE) course—“Writing and Editing in the Professions”—within the English Department. The TE students would be given reports or instructional manuals that the Mechanical Engineering (ME) students had to write as part of their capstone project, and the resulting editing of their documents would be done by these TE students. Subsequently, the ME students were given a survey and asked to comment on this experience. In addition, the TE students were also surveyed and asked to comment as well. It was concluded that the collaboration should continue for at least one more cycle, and that the TE students were more favorably inclined toward this collaboration than were the engineering students.