Supervising multidisciplinary final-year engineering students to develop CubeSats with an innovative project management method

It has been shown that developing nano-satellites is a good platform to motivate and educate students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. In this paper, the authors have explained an innovative project management method, called major-project-review, and its implementations to supervise different batches of multidisciplinary final year engineering students to develop a CubeSat as their Final Year Projects (FYPs) in three to four years. The major-project-review approach has been successfully verified in our first CubeSat project, Galassia, and is continuously used to develop our second CubeSat, Galassia2. From the success of Galassia and student feedbacks, the method has been proven to be very efficient to control and monitor the CubeSat development progress, and to motivate and educate engineering students. With our continuous implementations in Galassia2 project, we hope to collect more experiences and data to further optimize the approach.