Innovations in Teaching: Engineering Drawing and 3D Visualization

Abstract

A fundamental course offered at The Petroleum Institute (PI) in Abu Dhabi, to all sophomore engineering students, is Engineering Graphics. One of the objectives of the Engineering Graphics course is to equip students with the basic drawing and visualization skills required of competent engineers. With English being a second language, a number of issues in developing such a course had to be addressed: proficiency in the English language, previous drawing experience, 3D visualization skills, judicious and appropriate use of technology. While some of our sophomore students cope adequately with learning in English, many struggle to understand the language used in technical courses. Further, the majority of our students have no prior drawing experience and generally have poorly developed 3D visualization skills. This paper will consider how the learning process can be enhanced through appropriate use of technology. The development and delivery of an innovative, bespoke Engineering Graphics and 3D Visualization course will be presented. The course concentrates on developing visualization skills by providing a web-based, independent-learning component. Interactive multimedia resources were developed to accompany the sketching part of the course. The 3-dimensional sketching examples given in the course notes were modeled using the CAD software the students would learn later in the course. It was anticipated that, by providing these powerful visualization tools, students would intuitively understand the concepts even without previous exposure to Engineering Graphics or fluency in the language of instruction. In this paper, the course structure will be presented, our findings will be outlined and recommendations discussed.