Abstract
This portfolio includes three projects completed through the University of Virginia (UVA) Concrete Canoe Capstone: a technical project, an STS research paper, and an STS prospectus. While each focuses on a different part of the team, they all tie into how the team learns and builds on past work. Each project approaches this issue differently, addressing both the challenges and opportunities involved in improving long-term team performance.
The technical project focuses on improving both fabrication and organization within the UVA Concrete Canoe Team. The main goal was to design a two-plate injection-mold system that could produce more consistent canoe sections compared to traditional hand-packing methods. In past years, the team has dealt with issues such as uneven wall thickness, surface roughness, and design variations depending on who was building the canoe mold. This has made it difficult for teams to consistently improve from year to year. The injection-mold system was developed to create a more controlled process, where concrete is injected into a combined male-female mold system to improve uniformity in geometry and surface finish. To support this process, a gravity-fed pump was developed to regulate the flow of concrete into the mold, improving consistency during placement within the cavity. Multiple iterations were tested to evaluate factors such as injection port placement, liner materials, and concrete slump behavior. These prototypes helped identify both strengths and limitations in the design. Along with this, a Project Management (PM) framework was developed to improve how the team operates. This includes a structured annual competition cycle, clearer role definitions, task tracking systems, onboarding processes, and design checkpoints. These improvements help reduce confusion between subteams and make the overall design process more consistent.
The STS research paper examines why knowledge transfer is difficult in student engineering teams. Using the UVA Concrete Canoe Team as a case study, the paper argues that experiential learning does not automatically carry forward across different groups of students. Even though team members gain valuable knowledge through hands-on work, a lot of that knowledge stays tied to individual experience and is difficult to convey clearly to new members. The paper uses concepts like organizational memory, experiential learning, and transactive memory systems to explain how knowledge is developed and communicated. It highlights how, even when teams have access to previous work, they lack the context needed to apply past solutions to new design problems. Over time, this limits how much progress the team can make. This shows the gap between having information available and using it effectively. It also emphasizes that a team’s performance becomes heavily dependent on individual members, whose performance can vary significantly from year to year.
The STS prospectus represents the early stage of this research and introduces the main question that guided the project. At this stage, the project was more open-ended and examined important tensions seen within the team. The paper focuses on how student engineers balance innovation and structure in a real project setting by also using the UVA Concrete Canoe Team as context. The prospectus introduces the idea that students “learn through limits,” where constraints such as competition rules, materials, and team operation shape both design outcomes and learning experiences. It also identifies concepts such as infrastructure and experiential learning to explain how technical systems and team processes interact. This established a foundation for understanding how engineering practice is influenced by structure and limitations. These ideas helped guide the direction of the final research paper and were strengthened through further analysis.
These three projects are connected through their focus on how knowledge is created and used within the UVA Concrete Canoe Team. The technical project introduces systems that aim to make processes more consistent and easier to follow. The STS research paper explains why these challenges exist in the first place, showing that knowledge is not just written down but also depends on experience and interaction. The STS prospectus helps frame this relationship by showing how structure both supports and limits learning. Together, these projects show that improving a student engineering team is not just about better designs or better organization, but also about understanding how knowledge is built, shared, and carried forward over time. This reinforces the need for solutions that address both technical performance and team dynamics simultaneously. In this way, the technical systems and project management framework are not just design improvements, but also tools that help make knowledge more usable for future teams.
