Teaching Engineering through Design: A Novel Approach for a Department Level Reform Project

Engineering emphasizes human creation of products, processes and techniques aimed at making life better. The problem with traditional engineering education revolves around the use of stove-pipe curricula, using passive lectures and cookbook laboratories with apriori known results. Real-world engineering is open-ended and team-oriented requiring active participation. This paper describes our Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department’s ongoing reform project to develop curricula striving to change this model by helping students become creative designers through: (1) encouraging students to broaden their perspectives, (2) requiring innovation, not copying, (3) promoting a product orientation, (4) providing students insight both socially and psychologically as to the nature of creativity, (5) providing tools (both physical and cognitive) to aid in creativity (6) requiring and encouraging original and creative work. The paper outlines the process for developing the new curricula, getting faculty involved, and how open-ended design will be integrated into courses and the processes used to initiate implementation of the new programs.