An Assessment Study On Replacing The Engineering Graphics Course With The Fundamentals Of Engineering Design Course

Abstract

At New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), there has been a great effort in curriculum redesign. The initiative for this redesign was generated by the National Science Foundation (NSF) coalitions and many institutions of higher learning have responded. Our principal stakeholders, industrial colleagues, entering students, administrators and the faculty have also advocated curriculum reform. Our industrial colleagues kept telling us that they were satisfied with the student’s technical abilities but expressed concern about their abilities in communication skills and teamwork. Entering freshmen students wanted to get started with their engineering courses earlier in their studies and asked, “where is the beef”? Institute Administrators were addressing the problem of student retention. It seemed that even the faculty, who are generally conservative about curriculum reform, were ready to upgrade programs to meet the challenges of the new approaching millennium. Based on these inputs, at New Jersey Institute of Technology, a member of the Gateway Coalition, a fresh look at the freshman year curriculum was undertaken in 1992 resulting in a disciplinary, introductory freshman engineering designoriented program. The objective was to introduce entering freshman students to “ real engineering” up front. In 1992, this effort, which was of a disciplinary nature, led to a number of department- based experiential engineering design modules. These learning modules replaced the Engineering Graphics (EG) course, which was a traditional two credit hour course in almost every Freshman Engineering program for many years. Engineering Graphics introduced students to the fundamentals of sketching, isometric and orthographic drawings, dimensioning and scales. Students were also taught the principles of charts and graphs including graphical calculus. Applications in the various engineering disciplines were studied by means of graphical vectors in force analysis, piping symbols and diagrams, electrical symbols and diagrams and plot plans. The new Fundamentals of Engineering Design (FED) course modules were of a seven- (7) week duration, meeting three (3) hours per week for the Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, and Electrical Engineering Departments. The Mechanical Engineering Department, which had previously taught the Engineering Graphics course, developed a fourteen-week module. This module included a Computer Aided Design component with a strong emphasis on using the software tool “Pro ENGINEER” for three dimensional, solid modeling. These modules were paired with a semester length course in Humanities, which emphasized writing and other communication skills. Students were randomly assigned to the modules by the Dean of Freshman Studies and were required to take the Mechanical Engineering module and two of the sevenweek modules. These seven week modules were taught by faculty from Chemical, Civil and