Deconstructing Engineering Education Programmes: The DEEP Project to reform the mechanical engineering curriculum |
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| Authors: | Ilene Busch-Vishniac Tom Kibler Patricia B Campbell Eann Patterson Darrell Guillaume Jeffrey Jarosz |
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| Institution: | 1. McMaster University , 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4K1, Canada;2. Campbell-Kibler Associates, Inc. , 80 Lakeside Drive, Groton, Massachusetts, 02450, USA;3. Department of Mechanical Engineering , Michigan State University , 2727 Alliance Drive, East Lansing, MI, 48910, USA;4. Department of Mechanical Engineering , California State University at Los Angeles , 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles, CA, 90032, USA;5. American Association of State Colleges and Universities , 1307 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20005–4701, USA |
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| Abstract: | The goal of the Deconstructing Engineering Education Programmes project is to revise the mechanical engineering undergraduate curriculum to make the discipline more able to attract and retain a diverse community of students. The project seeks to reduce and reorder the prerequisite structure linking courses to offer greater flexibility for students. This paper describes the methods used to study the prerequisites and the resulting proposed curriculum revision. The process involved dissecting each course into topics at roughly the level of a line in a syllabus, editing the list of topics, associating prerequisites and successors to each topic and then using a genetic algorithm to produce clusters of topics. The new curriculum, which consists of 12 clusters, each of which could be a full year course, is quite different from the traditional curriculum. |
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| Keywords: | engineering education mechanical engineering |
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