Proposed Study for Evaluating & Selecting Mechanical Computer Aided Design for Engineering Design Graphics Courses

Design (MCAD) systems with constraint based modeling features have become a design tool for engineering graphics and advanced CAD courses in the department of engineering technology at Western Washington University. It is important to determine software that provides a user-friendly interface that will help a student understand modeling concepts and procedures. Therefore, the software interface must be able to easily communicate between a student and the MCAD system. A highly sophisticated MCAD interface may decrease learning efficiency or create a steeper student learning curve. Using system-usability criteria, two popular solid modeling applications packages will be evaluated by 25 students performing a basic solid model exercise. The applications to be evaluated are CATIA ® V5, R13 © and Pro/ENGINEER ® Wildfire 2.0™. The 25 students will be selected from local high schools and can be classified as beginners who are just learning the system. The purpose of each of the two applications is primarily for mechanical design. Each application will be evaluated on the basis ten different usability criteria: visual clarity, consistency, compatibility, informative feedback, appropriate functionality, flexibility and control, error reduction and correction, user guidance and support, system usability problems and sketching characteristics. A questionnaire approach will be used to provide significant data for making usability decisions. Usability is an important criterion for software selection committees to be able to make decisions about the suitability of software for first year students in an engineering or engineering technology program. The higher usability of a CAD system should be emphasized as a way of helping students to begin conducting design tasks successfully with minimum difficulty