Curriculum Integration Through a 4-year Design Project and Cross-course Educational Tools

In many curricula students find it difficult to understand the common thread and themes between their courses until near graduation (or ever). Thus, students are unable to benefit from the synergistic nature of a fully integrated program. Courses are taught by different instructors with different teaching styles and nomenclature (a potentially good thing), but all too often even the instructors are unaware of the material or educational objectives taught in complementary courses. Most engineering curricula require students to complete a capstone design project in their final semester/year before graduation. Students are required to combine concepts from several/all their courses to solve a real-world, practical problem; much like they will encounter in industry. While often effective at integrating course material for students, it may do so too late in their academic careers. I propose to add a curriculum-wide design project to our program that is presented to the students in their first petroleum class (PGE 301) taught in the spring of their first year. We have many large data sets in PGE provided to us by industry than that can be used for this initiative.  Homework assignments and projects will be designed by myself and a TA that are taken directly from the industry data set and provided to the course instructors. The students will maintain an online directory of their assignments and projects and will have already completed one major design project when they take their final design course.