DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A JUNIOR-YEAR DESIGN COURSE IN A MULTIDISCIPLINARY ENVIRONMENT ALONG WITH MEDIA ART AND MARKETING

摘要

Contemporary thought in engineering education is to provide the students with as much hands-on, real world experience as possible. Students are expected to hit the ground running in the work force immediately after their graduation and be savvy in many divergent skills such as teamwork, communication, project, people and business management. ABET (Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology) has included the multidisciplinary team experience as one of the assessable outcomes for students enrolled in any accredited engineering program. Social commentators [e.g.] have highlighted the need for businesses to succeed in a global environment and as such the education system must attempt to create engineers with global perspectives. There are several solutions to achieve this objective such as internships, co-op programs, student exchange programs, laboratory-intensive classes and the ever-popular Capstone Senior Design Project. This last and the most important topic of integrated design has been reviewed and discussed extensively in literature and engineering education conferences. There is considerable variability in the scope; breadth and depth of these capstone projects, the team size and composition and the time, and sponsors and budget for the projects. Some of these projects are fairly involved requiring budgets of up to USD40,000 while some projects require graduate students as an integral part of the design team. One common theme in most of these projects is that the courses are designed for senior students enrolled mainly in engineering and other disciplines. While these projects are multidisciplinary, synchronization of course syllabi across the disciplines was not made.