Connections: integrated first year engineering education at the Colorado School of Mines

We are developing and implementing the Connections program, an integrated series of active learning based courses and seminars which will allow first year engineering students to develop significant connections among their studies in humanities, social and physical sciences, and engineering. By connecting first year courses via a series of interdisciplinary modules and developing the connections further in a seminar series, we allow students to discover the relationships among the humanities, science, and engineering disciplines they are studying. The result is students who are beginning to construct the “big picture” of engineering as a human enterprise, thereby appreciating the importance of liberal learning in their education, their profession, and their lives. The paper describes the Connections structure including details of the Connections seminar and examples of Connections modules. We also report preliminary evaluation results from Connections pilot courses taught during the 1994-95 academic year