Deconstructing engineering education programmes: The deep project to reform the mechanical engineering curriculum

Ilene Busch-Vishniac, Tom Kibler, Patricia B. Campbell, Eann Patterson, Darrell Guillaume, Jeffrey Jarosz, Constantin Chassapis, Ashley Emery, Glenn Ellis, Horace Whitworth, Susan Metz, Suzanne Brainard, Pradosh Ray

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)269-283
Number of pages15
JournalEuropean Journal of Engineering Education
Volume36
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2011

Keywords

  • Engineering education
  • Mechanical engineering

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