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Session 3538 Developing the EDG Curriculum for the 21st Century: A Team Effort

Ronald E. Barr The University of Texas at Austin

ABSTRACT

A Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Instruction (CCLI) proposal was submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) in November 1998. The title of the proposal was “Engineering Design Graphics Summer School 1999: Planning the Engineering Design Graphics Curriculum for the 21st Century.” The project proposes to establish a team of highly-motivated Engineering Design Graphics faculty who will work together and devise a plan that will serve as a modern curriculum guide for Engineering Design Graphics. The inaugural event will consist of a Summer School to be held in the Summer of 1999. At this school, participating faculty will convene to discuss major issues, form sub-committee teams with specific assignments, and return to their home institutions to work on their specific parts of the curriculum plan. Interaction amongst the committees will be conducted through email and internet, and ideas will be discussed and tested in the classroom setting. The group will then reconvene for short 2- day meetings in the 1999-2000 era to finalize the curriculum plan. The results will then be published in a Monograph in time for the year 2001. The monograph will serve as a comprehensive EDG curriculum guide, and will be distributed to all college faculty who are identified as teaching Engineering Design Graphics, as well as to all Engineering and Technology Deans.

Introduction

The field of Engineering Design Graphics (EDG) has been a cornerstone in engineering education for over a century. Courses in EDG are typically incorporated into the curriculum in either the freshman or early sophomore year, and in many cases it is a core requirement for all engineering majors. In the past, the academic focus for Engineering Design Graphics has been developing methodology for producing and reading engineering drawings, which were the traditional communication links between design and manufacturing. Within this academic focus, students of EDG learned how to sketch, to make drawings with manual instruments, and more recently to make drawings with Computer-Aided Design and Drafting (CADD) systems. If courses at both four-year universities and two-year community colleges are included in the tally, it is estimated that over 100,000 students annually study within this EDG discipline.

The field of Engineering Design Graphics has also experienced a long succession of dedicated faculty members who have both fostered and promoted the graphics discipline in engineering education. Most of these EDG faculty have worked cooperatively over the years through the Engineering Design Graphics Division of ASEE. One of the major examples of this cooperative effort was the long series of Summer Schools that the Division had conducted, beginning in the early 1930’s. The most notable early Summer School was held after the war in St. Louis in 1946. Many of the pioneers in EDG education made presentations at the meeting, which resulted in a hardbound book [1] that charted the course for EDG education during the twenty-year post-war era. The seventh Summer School was held in 1967 in East Lansing, Michigan and it focused on integrating graphics more closely with the design process. The proceedings of that Summer School were published as a special edition of The Engineering Graphics Journal [2], and it served as a landmark document for the infusion of freshman design projects into EDG courses that were typical in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The last EDG Summer School was held in 1978, and it has now been twenty years without another one. It is the belief by many EDG faculty, and potential participants in this project, that time is overdue for another landmark EDG Summer School.

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Barr, R. E. (1999, June), Developing The Edg Curriculum For The 21 St Century: A Team Effort Paper presented at 1999 Annual Conference, Charlotte, North Carolina. 10.18260/1-2--7571