Engineering Interfaces

我们的目标是更好地准备工程和商业本科生的高技术专业的挑战，世纪。我们希望从一开始就灌输他们对即将进入的职业的广泛理解，创业精神以及适应激烈竞争需要改变职业道路的世界的能力。我们将通过开发两门综合课程来实现这一目标，这两门课程侧重于工程与社会和专业工作场所的接口。这些课程将采用积极的学习方法，并将分成若干单元，以便于输出。 这些课程将填补工程课程的空白，并为其他学科的学生提供以技术为导向的集中的核心，这应该在未来的努力中为他们服务。他们是在回应的不足，我们和其他人已经确定，并在最近的里程碑式的报告工程教育的未来ASEE，NRC和NSF，这是在ABET 2000年的缩影中列出的并行需求。我们建立在我们以前的NSF赞助的项目，由其他NSF资助的研究结果增强： 1.开发工程接口课程： a.工程的本质：分析与设计之间的关系：在第一年的课程中，学生将学习如何将工程分析的原则应用于工程设计问题。每个设计问题都是实际的，需要大量的分析来解决。 B.平衡成本，时间表和风险：这第三年的课程将提供风险和道德的升值，以解决技术工作，时间和风险之间的权衡。重点将放在检查众所周知的工程故障，以了解他们为什么发生，以及如何避免未来潜在的故障。 2.评估和评价：通过开发、试点和实施阶段对这些课程进行严格的评估和评价，特别注意通过更好地满足学生对教育价值、相关性和质量的期望来减少流失。 3.传播：传播的主要形式将是编写教科书和材料，以促进出口和在其他工程环境中的适应。还将通过会议介绍和互联网传播材料。

Our goal is to better prepare engineering and business undergraduates for the highly technical professional challenges of the 21st century. We wish to instill, from the start, a broad-based understanding of the profession they are about to enter, a spirit of entrepreneurship, and an ability to adapt to a world where intense competition will require changing career paths. We will do this by developing a two integrated courses which focus on engineering's interfaces with society and the professional workplace. These courses will utilize active learning methods and will be broken into modules to facilitate export. These courses will both fill gaps in the engineering curriculum and provide students from other disciplines with the core of technically oriented concentrations which should serve them well in future endeavors. They are in response to deficiencies that we and others have identified and which parallel needs laid out in recent landmark reports on engineering education's future by the ASEE, NRC and NSF, and which are epitomized in ABET 2000. We build upon our prior NSF sponsored projects, augmented by the results of other NSF funded studies to: 1. Develop Engineering Interface Courses: a. The Essence of Engineering: The Relationship between Analysis and Design: In this first year course, students will learn how to apply the principles of engineering analysis to engineering design problems. Each design problem will be practical in nature and require substantial analysis to resolve. b. Balancing Cost, Schedule and Risk: This third year course will provide an appreciation of risk and ethics in order to resolve trade-offs among technical effort, time and risk. An emphasis will be placed on examining well-known engineering failures to understand why they occurred and how future potential malfunctions might be avoided. 2. Assess and Evaluate: Conduct a rigorous assessment and evaluation of these courses through development, pilot and implementation stages, with particula r attention devoted to reducing attrition by better meeting students' expectations of educational value, relevance, and quality. 3. Disseminate: A primary form of dissemination will be the preparation of text books and materials which to facilitate export and adaption at other engineering settings. Material will also be disseminated via conference presentations and the internet.