ABSTRACT

The goal of an university engineering education is to train well-round engineers who could be innovative researchers or first-rate practioners participating in every facets of daily production and planning in a factory. Regardless of whatever his/her expertise and field of endeavor are, a well-trained engineer should be able to strive for maximum efficiency and highest product quality. To achieve this goal, the engineering program in an university must be broad in scope and yet be pragmatic and professional.

In response to the requirement of modern engineering education, Yuan Ze Institute of Technology (YZIT) has, under the auspices of the Technical Advisory Board of Executive Yuan, been engaging in an innovative co-op program and renovation of a series of engineering course programs. The present project represents a continuation of such efforts. First of all, the present project undertakes a series of course restructuring and integration in basic mathematics, communication, automatic control, and mechanical manufacturing and design. It is intended to integrate all these courses in a fashion that remains excellent continuity and coherence among all related subjects. Secondly, the current project also proposes a renovated course of introduction to engineering for freshman engineering students. The course deviates significantly from the traditional ones in that in the first year, a freshman is exposed to all basic principles of four engineering disciplines in a integrated one semester course taught by four faculty members from four engineering disciplines in an integrated one semester course taught by four faculty members from four participating engineering departments. Such a renovated course will be introduced in the 1996 academic year.

COURSE INTEGRATION

The present project represents a continuation of the previous one. Basically, the project is divided into two parts: First, integration of all course programs, and second, renovated introduction of engineering. In the following sections, the accomplishment of each part will be elaborated.

Integration of Mathematics

A quintessential problem confronting all engineering departments for quite some time is that an engineering student does not receive sufficient practical training before he/she graduates. This often leads to a mismatch of a fresh engineer's talents with the job requirements in an industrial environment. To remedy such an educational deficiency, restructuring of engineering education in terms of course structure, course contents and teaching methodologies is in order. This has been the motive underlying the call for proposal of the National Science Council, ROC in the past few years. A renovated engineering educational program should focus on practical engineering training and a more coherent training in basic sciences (mathematics, physics and chemistry). Furthermore, the new program must also be supplemented by a series of courses in humanity, social sciences and economics. In view of this, the purpose of the first subproject is intended to integrate the basic mathematical courses with other engineering courses. More specifically, attempt has been made to match the mathematics (calculus) with the needs of the first- and second-year science and engineering courses.

In the past year, we did an extensive survey among all YZIT engineering departments to seek out what are the most urgent needs of mathematics in relation to instructions of other engineering courses. In addition to this endeavor, we also frequently conducted informal meetings with numerous engineering faculty members to reinforce the survey. Such efforts helped us immeasurably in identifying preliminary what parts of calculus should be emphasized and in what sequence of teaching arrangement. This was a rather complex and time-consuming process because of the variability in engineering courses and mathematical requirements. Fortunately, we would be able to come to a preliminary agreement with all parties involved with a contingency of fine-tuning the mathematical course slightly to suit the need of each department. In fact, we held occasional discussion with all faculty members along the way so that mathematical and engineering courses could be better integrated. In the future, we will be also exploring the possibility of eventually merging the mathematical course into the engineering instructions.

Telecommunication Course

Telecommunication industry has been designated as one of the key industrial developments of this nation in the near future. Hence, requirement of engineering manpower will be acute. Instruction of telecommunication-related courses in most of the electrical engineering departments is fragmented. The problems confronting the EE departments include:

1. There is lack of coherent integration of all courses, resulting in difficulty for students to gain an overall picture of the training.
2. Replication of teaching materials in various courses does occur often and the arrangement of number of credit-hours is rigid.
3. Theoretical aspects of the courses are overemphasized and there is lack of more practical design training and use of computer software packages.
4. There is a serious lack of mutual communication between the lecturers and the students and thus no feedback from the students about the courses.

The subproject is intended to remedy these problems by introducing a telecommunication macro-courses in the 3rd and 4th years of the electrical engineering department such that junior and senior can elect as a specialized course program. We do hope the integrated course program can better prepare students for the future job market.

The subproject will last three years and the present one is in the second year. The current efforts are to gather information regarding the course structure in other universities in this and foreign countries. The telecommunication macro course will last three semesters in the junior and senior years. The instructions will be highly interactive with strong tie between lecture and S/W and II/W laboratories. In addition, seminars require active students' participation. Short research/design projects will also be assigned to students toward the end of the course program to enable students to apply what they have learned in the course program to practical cases.

To make the courses more attractive and interesting to the students, demonstration software programs are extensively used in conjunction with the lecturings. The student version of MATLAB operated under Window 3.1 has been employed by incorporating many telecommunication principles.

Automatic Control

Automatic control is a course appearing commonly in the disciplines of chemical, electrical and mechanical engineering. Although the basic principles underlying the course are the same, there are significant differences in the applications of these principles in various engineering disciplines. The present subproject of automatic control was organized by an EE professor and thus was devoted to the electrical engineering aspects. In the second year, emphasis was placed on organizing basic course structure and preparing the instruction materials. Course lecturing using the new materials would also be implemented on a tentative basis. To complement the class lecturing, practical case study projects would also be assigned to students to enable them to gain better insight about the theories.

In the future, an experimental laboratory course will be developed. In this course, the students will be able to perform simple machine and numerical controls in the laboratory to gain on-hand experiences. Furthermore, computer simulation using control software packages on workstations or pentium PCs will be practiced by students as a supplement to the hardware experiments.

Regarding the course structure, we have designed a series of courses, designated at Automatic Control I, Automatic Control II and Automatic Control III, respectively. Each course lasts 18 weeks of lecture and is assigned 3 credits. This series of courses will be supplemented by two experimental courses as described above.

Manufacturing and Design Program

Computer-aided engineering will be a key focus of the mechanical engineering department in the future and manufacturing and design program is a course work that completely relies on this technology. What we intend to do at YZIT is to combine computeraided manufacturing and design course with practical case study.

In the first of this subproject, we did extensive survey in regard with the theoretical basis of this course program. Also completed was the course design, paying particularly attention to systematic and practical integration of computer-aided engineering and product-oriented mechanical design.

The course integration consists of core course in mechanical design and manufacturing complemented by automatic control and computer analysis. The basic structure of the course program includes computer control, static structural analysis, finite element analysis, transmission element design and uses, mechanical design principle, optimal design, electronic and senor elements, mechanical vibration, etc. To encourage students' participation, we formed a design team working on the economic car. The finished prototype was done on time to enter the nationwide field competition and luckily won a second place in the contest. This was quite an encouragement to the design team and supervising faculty.

The purpose of the second car subproject is to continue the course integration started in the previous year. Idealistically, a computer-aided design environment could be established such that through the internal computer network system, numerical controller and machining can be tied to work together as a team. Using such a system, students could perform design, analysis and manufacturing in the same place, considerably facilitating the course instruction. Originally, we planned to purchase additional equipment in the second year, such a CNC programmable machine and other machine tools. Unfortunately, due to budget cuts in the project funding, there was little we could do to improve the system.

In the future, we will continue to improve the experimental work and lecture notes we prepared in the first and second years. Hopefully, after the subproject is completed, we will have a first-rate teaching facility of computer-aided manufacturing and design which will be highly helpful to our teaching program.

RENOVATED INTRODUCTION TO ENGINEERING

Introduction to engineering is a traditional course all freshmen take in the first year. Every engineering department tailors the course by introducing the student to what they will learn, the course they will take and the future job prospects. To present such an overall picture to the new students requires a senior faculty who has had extensive teaching and industrial experiences. Very often, the faculty assigned to teach this course is a junior member which defies the original intention.

Another problem associated with this traditional course is that all students are exposed to the discipline of their choice only. The modern society has been that an engineer in any professional often encounters with problems unrelated to his/her training. For example, a mechanical engineer may face problems related to chemical or electrical engineering. All the engineer needs to solve this problem is basic chemical or electrical knowledge. Early exposure of students of one discipline to other disciplines is highly beneficial. Furthermore, a high school student usually does not have much idea about the engineering discipline he/she chooses to major. Hence, exposure to other disciplines can be helpful too if he/she wants to switch major in the second year.

In the renovated introduction to engineering, we ask each of the four engineering departments to assign an experienced faculty to participate in the program. The course carries a 3 credit-hour and has a 3-hour lecture each week. The course starts off with a common gathering for all students which involves a 1-hour brief introduction of the over all course structure by the Dean of Engineering and the participating faculties and this is followed by a 2-hour introduction on how to do literature search by reference librarian. In the next four weeks, a EE faculty starts the lecture to the home department (EE) freshman students and so do other participating engineering faculties. In the second four weeks, the EE faculty goes to teach ME students and ME faculty teaches ChE class and so forth. After that, all students meet again in a common gathering and this time we invite a heavily experienced executive in the industry to give a lecture on how to get prepared for the future job market. The rotation of teaching duty resumes again after that until the end of the semester which lasts 18 weeks. Each faculty could evaluate the students' performances by giving the students a short quiz or in whatever fashion at the end of his/her tenure of a lecturing leg. The final grade of a student is the average of the four grades given by the participating faculties.

The idea behind the renovated program sounds good and is strongly supported by the YZIT school of engineering; however, the real benefit needs to be evaluated next year. If the response is positive, we will continue to improve and offer the program. Otherwise, it can be terminated after the trial period.

Acknowledgments: The author sincerely thanks the National Science Council, Taiwan, ROC for the financial support (under the grant NSC85-2512-S155-002E) of this project.

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