Being Visual Thinking and Spatial abilities as Paramount for engineering, presence of grapchic subjects in engineering curricula is still scarce and in cases dissapearing. For future engineering challenges, educational programs should be aware of this and take more importance. What do you think?
Nice. I totally agree that they are dissapearing. This is a great subject and I am glad you are interested in exploring this. I am a visual learner and I did not get many visuals in many of my courses. In many cases... I had to resort to Google to find images to feed my visual curiosity. A few things I would ask personally is this...
1. Can you expound upon what is meant by graphic subjects? i.e. AutoCad Inventor, Vizimag, Solid Works.etc, and how could such technology be implemented in courses that are taught in a short time span from 50 mins to an hour and 15?
2. Also, how would you assess/evaluate the lack of visualization material and its impact on engineering student performance? Our engineering curricula at my institution certainly lacks in using various visual technologies in the undergraduate curricula... such as materials science, solid mechanics and finite element analysis... and I do see those signs of weakness in many students when it comes time for them to design projects in their senior design courses and senior seminars.
Dear Jamel,
I refer to graphic subjets to all engineering graphic topics which are taught in engineering faculties, since freehand drawing to CAD, descriptive geometry and so on. All of these are important to teach fot future engineers. Each faculty implement specific CAD software, according to industrial needs (e.g. CATIA foe aerospace engineers, Inventor/Solidworks for Design Engineers) but in my opinion it is more important to include CAD principles, such as constructive geometry, Bezier curves 3D modelling, and practicing with some of these CAD system´s basics. Other approach is to include Optative complementary courses for CAD or MEF systems for practicing.
The effects of the decline of graphic activities mean a lack of spatial reasoning and also on visual thinking, which allows for problem solving and design ideation. It can be easily evaluated by comparing student´s performance from a faculty that has few visual subjets with others from on which enhances these topics. A typical study is comparing engineering students with industrial design students performance and see whose shows better and most creative results.
Jamel,
I ckeched your engineering curricula and found no EG subject! This is worrying, in my opinion. I can only explain from the basis that freshmen also aquired drawing skills from high school. This is correct? Anyway, I think that is is needed a basic EG coruse including topics as I mentioned in previous answer.
Also saw that you have an optative drawing subject. May be you can measure benefits of graphic skills by comparing a case study resuls between freshmen students who studied this artistic drawing sibjets with othre who doesn´t.
Hi,
We find that engineering students are indeed lacking in the ability to visualise as indicated by their poor ability to read and translate engineering drawings. Our study and findings are reported in this article.
Burvill, C., Field, B., Abdullah, Z. and Alias, M. (in press) Problem-solving with Industrial Drawings: Supporting Formal Graphics Language Development for Malaysian Engineering Graduates. International Journal of Engineering Education
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