Work in progress — Technical freehand sketching

In the past all engineering students took a drafting class. This involved the use of T-squares, triangles, architectural scales, pounce, eraser shields, bow compasses, pencils, and patience. It gave students a sense of how drawings and diagrams are made and used. As new subjects have come into the curriculum most engineering programs have dropped the drafting requirement, or at least replaced it with a computer-based CAD course. Also dropped, as a consequence, is the ability of engineering students to visually express the ideas they see in class and those that form in their heads. This paper describes the effort to address this change. This project is the result of a joint effort between an engineering and an art professor to empower students with the simple skills of producing reliable hand drawings for their notes and when expressing their design ideas. The result is a one-hour, lunch-time seminar open to engineering and science students to improve their technical freehand sketching techniques. They were coached by both professors in the techniques of hand sketching, including drawing straight and orthogonal lines, circles and ellipses, 2- and 3-D diagrams, graphs and charts, and labeling and lettering. Specific activities were used to gauge the improvement by the students as they progressed through the one-semester mini-course. This paper shares the best and the worst of this endeavor. This work was supported in part by a grant from the Professional Development Committee of SUNY Adirondack.