On Teaching CAD/CAE Applications Course
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Abstract
The application of Computer Aided Design and Engineering has been very popular in the engineering industry recently due to its usefulness in significantly reducing the time-to-market and cost involved within the design lifecycle of an engineering product. Despite the extensive availability of step-by-step manuals and tutorials to learn such tools, the emphasis of synergic utilization of such tools within the engineering design process has not been effectively addressed. Students often pay attention to learn how to use the tools instead of why to use such tools. In this paper, we present an innovative engineering education framework with various collaborative and interactive inclass activities and Web 2.0 tools to address the above issues in a senior undergraduate/graduate level CAD/CAE Applications course offered at the University at Buffalo. Specifically, we categorize the approaches based on the following components: (a) traditional lecture and computer labs, (b) team-based projects, (c) in-class activities, and (d) online course management tools. We show how the proposed approaches can be merged to the existing course syllabus in a synergic manner based on our experience. We also describe the rationale of the approaches and the expected outcome/improvements.