Design Fair

Near the end of Winter semester, we will hold a Design Fair where you will have the opportunity to demonstrate the desirability of your design. Similar to a science fair, you will set up a display that shows your hardware along with a poster than describes the challenges your design overcomes and how well it has been demonstrated to meet the challenges.

To help you prepare for the Design Fair, we will hold a Design Fair Dry Run three weeks before the Design Fair.

Design Fair Dry Run

We will hold Design Fair Dry Runs for each Capstone Team. Teams will have a 12-minute period assigned where their pod instructor will visit the team's site and see their planned Design Fair booth. Specific details of the schedule will be provided by your pod instructor.

The purpose of the dry run is to help you see how well-prepared you are for the final Design Fair. It has been our experience that this will help you focus on the things you need to do to get fully prepared for the final fair.

The dry run will be your opportunity to demonstrate the desirability of your design to your pod instructor and other potential visitors. You should plan to demonstrate prototypes and/or models that are used to predict or measure the performance of your design. You should also have a draft of your project poster (printed in full color at 11×17 size) available for review.

You should plan to demonstrate the progress you have made in achieving the desirability goals for your project.

You should prepare a brief narrative that you expect to share with visitors at your booth. When a visitor comes to your booth, you should be prepared to give a brief pitch that summarizes the challenge, your solution, and the quality of your solution. The instructors will be giving you feedback on your pitch.

You are not expected to see any other teams' Design Fair Dry Run booths, but you are welcome to attend. Attending other teams' dry runs may give you some ideas about how you can improve your booth and pitches.

Final Design Fair

A design fair will be held near the end of Winter semester as a chance for the campus community to see all the great work accomplished in Capstone. Your team will display your design and poster in a booth, and explain the desirability of your design to guests of the event. If possible, you will also want to display and demonstrate hardware and/or software prototypes.

In addition to the sponsors, the design fair will attract the general public and next year’s Capstone students.

We invite media representatives to the design fair, and one or two interesting projects are often highlighted on local news. Sometimes the stories are carried nationally.

We hope you'll be excited about this opportunity to share your work with lots of people and that you'll do your best to have an exciting presentation.

Your team will need to set up your booth before the beginning of the fair..

The design fair lasts for two hours, and we expect at least one person from your team to be at the booth at all times during the fair.

You will need to remove your materials from your booth at the completion of the fair.

Approximately three weeks before the final design fair, the Capstone office will request information concerning the booth size and utilities needed for your display. Please respond promptly to allow us to properly organize the fair.