Senior design teams find remote solutions

摘要

The pandemic shutdown created a dilemma for undergraduate students involved in senior design team projects at Georgia Tech's H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. The projects are a graduation requirement in which teams partner with businesses to solve specific problems (see an example in the July 2019 Case Study, Hnk.iise.org/isejuly2019_casestudy). The work involves up to 15 hours a week and multiple on-site visits. But with the campus and businesses shuttered, 218 students in 30 groups had to improvise ways to work and communicate. "We were concerned about not being able to communicate as effectively as we had been during our in-person meetings," said senior Alice Pagoto, an IISE member. "We had spent many hours working in close collaboration on the most important parts of our project, and we didn't know if we could continue the same quality over video calls."