New CAD/CAM course framework in digital manufacturing

Despite the importance of manufacturing industry, its position in a nation's economy has shown its shrinking; the workforce in manufacturing industry has been continuously declined. Engineering universities are highly pressured to attract new-generation youth to traditional engineering programs and improve their retention ratios by keeping students in engineering programs. There is an emerging need to bring some innovations in engineering curriculum design to keep up with the rapid changes in other fields, especially, information technology (IT). In this paper, we focus on our effort in developing a new computer aided design (CAD) and computer integrated manufacturing CAM) course. Literatures on CAD/CAM course designs are surveyed to identify the limitations in traditional teaching CAD/CAM, the trend of manufacturing technologies is discussed to determine the industry's expectations of their new employees. A new CAD/CAM course has been designed by incorporating the theory of Digital Manufacturing and CAD/CAM integrated tools together in teaching.