Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-23-2013
Abstract
Engineers use engineering graphics to describe their design, to exchange ideas, and to communicate with others. As an important communication tool, most engineering department commits at least two courses on engineering graphics. The mechanical engineering technology at the college offers three engineering graphics courses for its associate degree program. The objective is to give students opportunity to get familiar with different type of engineering graphics from 2D to 3D and from general graphics to mechanical engineering specific graphics gradually so they can apply these engineering graphics skills in their senior courses such as in machine design. Despite the extensive offering of engineering graphics courses to students, a review of students design work in senior design project of the machine design course revealed that students still lacked certain skills and understanding when creating their design models and working drawings. For examples, many students didn’t understand the difference between working drawings and the corresponding 3D objects, they had difficulty in creating sheet metal components and gears, and most importantly, and many students still treated engineering graphics work in product design as design of unrelated individual components instead of treating them as integral part of a system. In fall 2012 the instructor who teaches senior design project, started to collaborate with instructors who teach engineering graphics to address these issues mentioned above. Students were given a design project that require the students to create many common mechanical components used in product design such as gears, sheet metal components, and mechanical subsystems such as differential drive and steering system. Students not only have to pay attention on how to create these components correctly, they have to pay attention on the relationships among these components when they are assembled together. This gives students a better understanding on how to use engineering graphics in product design. The details concerning the implementation of intradepartmental collaborative work including assessment will be discussed this paper as well as in future papers.
Comments
Zhang, A. S., & GAILANI, G. B. (2013, June), Intradepartmental Collaboration to Improve the Quality of Engineering Drawings Created by Students in Senior Design Project Paper presented at 2013 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Atlanta, Georgia. 10.18260/1-2--19824 © 2013 American Society for Engineering Education.