Engineering Design Graphic Journal (ASEE - American Society for Engineering Education)
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Simulations and Manipulatives used to Better Understand Graphics, Statics & Dynamics Concepts
Get PDFThis paper is intended to investigate the merits of adding manipulative devices and solid model simula¬tions to accompany traditional lecture and demonstration materials to a Dynamics course. Based on the successes of Graphics courses using manipulative devices and simulation software to enhance spatial vi¬sualization skills in engineering students, a pilot study in a Dynamics course adding a 4-bar linkage mech¬anism and a NX software simulation was used. A pre-test was administered prior to using the intervention and post test results were collected after. Analysis of the pre- and post- quiz scores showed sufficient improvement in learning to encourage the continued development of more manipulatives and simulations for Dynamics. Recommendations are made to study whether similar methods will impact student learning in Statics courses
Message from the Editor - The Times They Are A-Changin'...
No full textBob Dylan’s lyrics keep playing in my head. Come gather ‘round people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown And accept it that soon You’ll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you Is worth savin’ Then you better start swimmin’ Or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin’ (Dylan, 1964, 1967, 1979, 1985, 1991, 1993, 1995, 2000). Imagine this. It is the beginning of the semester, and the chemistry professor walks into his or her class and observes that the chemistry periodic table of the elements has been revised within the past couple of months; in fact, the atomic structure of Polonium, Antimony, and Boron have not only changed, but the names and some of the properties of all of the Metalloids have been revised. Truth or fiction? Well, in a graphic technology classroom, this would be a normal event. That is what makes professors who teach and research technology different from other disciplines. “Change” is our middle name. It is our one constant. The one thing we can be sure of is that technology changes, and we have to change along with it. The active core of the Engineering Design Graphics Division are baby boomers who are now beginning to seriously consider retiring within five to 10 years. This is not just a professional organization of university graphics professors. This is a tight group of professionals who have become friends throughout the years. We see each other twice a year. Many have done so for over 20 to 30 years. We have become a family. It will soon be time for the members in their 20s and 30s to step up to the plate and take over the leadership roles. The vision of the Engineering Design Graphics Division has expanded, just as the type of members have diversified. We also welcome community college instructors and encourage undergraduate and graduate students to attend the conferences and present their research. We have covered topics in online learning, animation, project management, assessment and international studies in all areas of graphics. We have grown together in this world of the “teacher scholar” and realize the importance of access to research and the importance of citing each other. We are forming a task force to set up having our conference proceedings and Journals available online, having abstracts posted on our website (edgd.org), and becoming members of Google Scholar and ERIC. The future publication process will include permission of EDGD to publish articles from the proceedings and Journal in ERIC and Google Scholar. This issue of the Engineering Design Graphics Journal focuses on the history and assessment of engineering design graphics. The “Engineering Design Graphics: Into the 21st Century” article traces the 6,000-year journey of engineering design graphics and the impact it has had in the academe and on the profession and the way designers work. It addresses the future of the discipline and the inevitable changes coming about because of emerging technologies. Brad Kinsey et al. combined a subset of the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test and a self-efficacy test that they developed to investigate the “Effect of Object and Rotation Type on Self-efficacy and Spatial Ability Test Results.” The participants in this study were engineering students from a variety of disciplines. In the article “Drafting the Basics” Carol M. Lamb and David G. Kurtanich identified, evaluated, and developed a course to address the importance of drafting/plan preparation and plan reading skills required by the various engineering technology programs. I hope you enjoy this issue of the Journal and I encourage all of you to submit articles to be published. All articles were submitted to the same peer-review process and accepted using a double-blind review. That way, EDGD officers can publish their articles in the Journal under the same scrutiny as the other authors. Just as I set down the proof of this issue, I thought about the video conferences I just completed with graduate students defending their Applied Projects through networking three different campuses in two different states. Hmmm ... The times they are a changin’ ..
Message from the Chair
Get PDFMy second Journal Chat is being written just after the successful Engineering Design Graphics Division 60th Annual Mid-Year Technical Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. As I mentioned in my last chat, we are the only ASEE Division to conduct a conference on its own. In addition to yours truly being General Chair, Mike Stewart was Program Chair and published a great 176 page Proceedings. Katherine Holliday-Darr was Registration Chair and processed the 48 members and their 10 guests. Six attendees were first timers and will become new members of the Division. Jon Duff was Exhibitors/Sponsors Chair and arranged for four exhibitors: Autodesk, Schroff Development Corporation, Solidworks, and Thompson/Delmar Publishers. Twenty three Technical Presentations were made during six Technical Sessions moderated by Douglas Baxter, Ted Branoff, Aaron Clark, Retha Groom, Moustafa Tossi, and Nancy Study. The Oppenheimer Best Technical Presentation Award was won by new ASEE/EDG member Eric F. Kirton of New England Institute of Technology for his paper “Utilizing Rapid Prototyping for Architectural Modeling”. Catherine Newman and David Wittenborn, both PhD students at University of California-Berkeley and Purdue University respectively, were paper presenters who received Travel Grant Awards from the Schroff Development Corporation. A wonderful field trip was conducted to visit the faculty and students at the Stranahan High School engineering magnet program. In addition to also conducting the business of the EDG Division, the attendees had a dinner/cruise on the Inner Costal Waterway. Yours truly and my wife enjoyed the Pre-Conference Cruise and Golf Outing. Thank you to all participants and attendees for making the 60th Mid-Year one of the Division years highlights. Pat Connolly, a Chicago native, is the EDG Division Program Chair for the upcoming ASEE Summer Conference. Pat has a full complement of technical sessions planned for the division, plus an exciting off-site Division Annual Banquet. Look for details of this event in your ASEE Prime Magazine or on the ASEE Web Site. In my last chat I challenged the membership to become involved with the activities of the EDG Division. Jon Duff is a Membership Committee of one. He could use some assistants willing to develop and promote ideas for membership growth. Doug Baxter is host of the 61st Mid-Year Conference. He is looking for volunteers to be Program Chair, Registration Chair, and Session Moderators. Doug is also our 2006 Student Design Contest Chair. He can use volunteers to be judges at the competition at the Summer Conference. Frank Croft is our Division Program Director. Since Frank is about to become ASEE President, he will need an assistant to plan division meetings out to 2010. Tom Krueger is Liaison Vendors and Publishers Committee Chair. Tom could use a Publishers Assistant so that he can concentrate on identifying new vendors. Two EDG Committees currently have no one serving on them. The Liaison Industry and Manufactures Committee and the Professional and Technical Engineering Design Graphics Standards Committees both need a Chair. All Division Committees could use some new faces. Check out the Division Web Site and let me know where you are willing to help. Do not forget to vote for your 2006-2007 Division Officers. I look forward to seeing you at the ASEE Annual Conference in Chicago this summer
Message from the Chair - Online? Are you kidding me?
No full textI fell in love with engineering graphics in 1975 when I was exposed to it as part of an industrial arts course in junior high. I took four years of drafting in high school, and then went to North Carolina State University to study mechanical engineering. I can vividly remember sitting in my dorm room doing dynamics homework during my junior year thinking, “I don’t want to do this anymore!” I was not doing graphics, and I could not see myself doing calculus the rest of my life. After a little bit of research, I found a program in the College of Education that prepared individuals to teach at the post-secondary level. At that time I could not see myself teaching. I had worked part time at Measurements Group for a year and Siemens-Switchgear Division for three years doing specifications drafting. I really wanted to graduate and begin working fulltime. But something happened during the fall of 1985 that changed my plans – I completed my student teaching assignment. I taught two sections of Engineering Graphics I at NC State and discovered the joys of being in the classroom. The next fall I was hired to teach five sections of the introductory engineering graphics course, and I have been there since. Although I have not seen as many changes as some of you old-timers, I did start out on the drafting board. My first job was creating PC board layouts – ink on mylar and lettering with a Leroy lettering set. Over the last 30 years, engineering graphics’ standards have not changed much. The tools that we use have changed drastically. We have all had to adapt to changes in CAD software – 2D, 3D wireframe, solid modeling, and now constraint-based CAD and PDM systems. The Internet has also influenced not only what we plan to do but what our students expect us to do. In a rush to make administrators and students happy, many of us have or are planning to create online graphics courses. Will this work? Will the courses be just as good as face-to-face courses? How will we evaluate sketching exercises and other student work? Do we even need to worry about sketching? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I have some thoughts. I believe my best teaching occurs when I have about 10 students in a face-to-face course. This allows me to really get to know what each student can do, and I have plenty of time to give each one meaningful feedback on their work. Fantasy over! Not many administrators are going to let us get away with teaching only 10 students. Students are also expecting something different. Some want to be able to review a lecture in a podcast format while working out at the gym. There are now many online tools available that allow us to supplement what we do in the classroom. These include both synchronous and asynchronous tools such as streaming media, discussion boards, online quizzing, whiteboards, audio/video, and chatrooms. They all seem great, but are they better for our students? I am sure we all have our opinions. I know we have had heated discussions here at NC State about these technologies. If you are also experiencing these issues, I would like to encourage you to conduct research that will address these questions. Instead of blindly jumping into some of these technologies, let’s design some good studies that will provide meaningful information to the division concerning online instruction
Message from the Chair
Get PDFThis May I will be giving a talk on the “State of Engineering Design Graphics in the United States” to the Japan Society for Graphics Science in Tokyo. While planning for this talk, I began thinking about where our division has come since I joined in 1987 and how the types of presentations have become more diverse. I know the division has had a rich history dating back to the 1940’s, but I believe developments in technology over the last three decades have forced us to change at an exponential rate. The first midyear conference I attended was in Austin, Texas in January of 1987. I was almost 24 years old and beginning my second semester teaching at NC State. I was naïve and easily persuaded to indulge in the Austin night-life by my veteran colleagues (thanks John Crow, John Freeman, Garland Hilliard, Bill Ross, and Bill VanderWall). Austin was where I was first introduced to the folks who would shape who I am professionally. Some have been a consistent influence, while others I only remember seeing a few times over my career. Since then many others in the divisions have been a big part of who I am. I pulled out the agenda for that conference today, and skimmed over the articles again. I was surprised to see that almost every one of the papers addressed some issue related to computer graphics. It was obvious that this was a time when we were all trying to figure out how computer graphics would influence our profession. Topics included computer graphics laboratory layout, computer graphics hardware, integration of CAD into freshman courses, and 3D graphics. Many of the papers involved picks and clicks (if I may borrow a term from my colleague Nate Hartman). Ron Barr and Davor Juricic presented a paper that was a little more philosophical. They speculated that the “reign of this 3D CADD” would only last about 5 years, and that by “1995 we could expect a new cornerstone in the development of the procedures available to the designer.” I think they were right. Constraint-based CAD has definitely changed the tools available to designers. They also predicted that 10 years down the road we would still have the name Engineering Design Graphics, but that the topics taught would not be the same. They predicted our introductory courses would revolve around “three-dimensional detail design and StereoCAD literacy.” Here we are 20 years later, and I still believe we are involved in three-dimensional design. I am not sure if StereoCAD literacy is an integral part of what we all do. One might argue that spatial literacy is what we are all about. I know some in our division have investigated how stereoscopic technologies and virtual reality environments can change the way people visualize and design. What are we doing now? Today I also pulled out the proceedings from the 61st Annual Midyear in San Diego this past January. There were a couple papers that mention something about computer graphics in the title. There were presentations about approaches to solving visual communications problems, civic engagement, design strategies in a sophomore level aerodynamics class, online questioning strategies, a revised Bloom’s taxonomy, image-based lighting, interactive information design learner-centered experience, utilizing legacy CAD data, visual data mining operations, collaborative design, a phenomenological examination of spatial ability, 3D CAD and STEM education, accreditation vs. program ... review, developing 3D spatial abilities among K-12 students, and non-parametric statistics. Wow! What a difference. Are all of these folks involved in Engineering Design Graphics? Probably not, but the ones who are no longer emphasize the tool as much as what we do with the tool. What do all of these papers have in common? I think all of the authors are folks involved with graphics in some kind of design environment. They care about what they teach and reflect on how they teach. Does it matter if our division is no longer such a homogeneous group? To some people it might, but I have to say Jon Duff hit the nail on the head when in San Diego he said, “The Engineering Design Graphics Division has been successful because of our ability to change.” What will the presentations look like 20 more years down the road? I don’t know if I can even imagine at this point, but I’m sure we’ll have fun finding out
Message from the Editor
No full textDear Members: At the end of last semester, a staff member asked me how things were going and a I replied that I just had a few more projects to grade before I wrapped up the semester. Her reply got me thinking. She said that she would like to see "closure" like that with her job. As I though about it, I realized that over the years this aspect of my job has saved my sanity many times. The "fresh start" aspect of teaching gives us time to reorganize, fix problems and just get energized. After all, we can all withstand a bad schedule, a few unmotivated students or teaching a class that is not our favorite for one semester. We know that at the end of that time period we have a chance at something better. We have the advantage of just having to hold on for a few more weeks if classroom strategies are failing or enjoy the success when things are going well—without having to maintain it forever. I know that many times, I have thought to myself - "if I can just make it to the end of the semester I can get caught up, I can revise my course materials, I won't have to deal with that student..." Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't, but I at least appreciate the chance to try and the hope that one day I will be caught up! Please note a few things in this issue. First, some of you may have noticed that the issue and volume number are the same as the last issue. That last issue should have been - Volume 61, Number 3. New editor - oops! Second, Jon Duff, Division Chair, outlines the current division awards as well as three new Division awards. So if you ever wondered how to qualify for some of the past Division awards or are hoping to attain one of the new ones, you will have all the information you need. THird, Gary Bertoline, Past Chair, tries to express what many of us felt about Rodger Payne in a tribute to his memory. Last, the Executive Board voted to drop page charges for EDGD members at their last meeting! Enjoy the rest of your semester