A Change in the Freshman Engineering Education Paradigm: Bringing Engineering Design Up-front in the Curriculum

engineering curriculum re-design. Industrial colleagues, entering students, administrators, and faculty have expressed the need for curriculum reform. In response to these stimuli, a disciplinary freshman engineering program was initiated in 1992 to introduce entering freshman to "real engineering " up-front. Stakeholder concerns ranged from administrators viewing retention as a problem, students asking "where's the beef”, industrial representatives expressing concerns about interdisciplinary team work and communication skills, and lastly, faculty wanting upgrading and curriculum reform. These concerns led to the development of discipline based experiential learning modules of seven weeks, meeting three hours a week. Students were required to take two modules from different disciplines sequentially in their freshman year coupled with a 14 week Computer Aided Design/Graphics, Mechanical Engineering course and a semester length, Humanities course emphasizing report writing, oral presentations an