Today's students, tomorrow's engineers: an industrial perspective on CAD education

Today, they are students in colleges and universities. Tomorrow, they will be engineers in various industrial sectors. One of the primary goals of education is to prepare people for successful careers in the real world. As in every course, students want to obtain the maximum value of a CAD related course for their future careers. They want to obtain knowledge and skills that are most practical and useful to them when they become engineers. College professors and teachers also want to provide the maximum value for students in their CAD courses. The question is: what should be included in such a CAD curriculum. This paper tries to answer some critical questions related to developing such a curriculum, from an industrial perspective, based on the authors' survey results and the first author's own (rather limited) experiences as a R&D staff for a CAD vendor. It focuses on issues related to teaching and training students on CAD systems. These include, for different roles, how much underlying mathematical foundations in CAD systems should be taught, how much computer skills and engineering knowledge the students should know, how much design methodologies related to CAD systems should be taught, and how much ability the students should develop in order to specify their CAD needs and to evaluate and choose the CAD systems most suitable for their specific applications. The paper then shares some personal experiences and suggestions from long-term CAD veterans on the essential topics of CAD education. Based on the survey results, last section concludes the paper by authors' suggestions on what should be included in CAD curriculums for different levels of students. (C) 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.