ENGINEERING INVENTIONS: DESIGN OF A PROJECT BASED INTEGRATED COURSE

In engineering education integrative methods helps students to establish link between various engineering topics as well as make them discover the relevance of the material being taught. This approach also provides many avenues for experimentation, as well as practicing engineering design and application. Consequently, learning becomes more experiential which enables students to comprehend, retain and apply the knowledge better. In this paper, we present an integrated project based module namely “Engineering inventions” which is offered as an enrichment course to second year electrical and mechanical engineering students at diploma level. This course is primarily designed to help students in establishing the link between math, science and different disciplines of engineering by using the history of Asian engineering as a theme to connect them. Learning takes place in a studio environment and it’s conducted by a team of faculty from four different departments. As a project, students design and build engineering artefacts by taking inspirations from the history of Asian engineering and inventions. During the implementation, teaching team also use the same subject for practical examples and activities to explain some of the engineering principles. In addition to our pedagogical objectives, we hope to inculcate research skills in our students as well as widen their horizon. We believe it is important for our students’ to acquire knowledge from fields other than engineering to broaden their view. Therefore, students are expected to do an in depth analysis and demonstrate a good understanding of the needs resulted in these inventions and their impacts in various areas such as society, economy, agriculture, military, and so on.