First-year introductory courses as a means to develop conceive –
design – implement – operate skills in engineering education
programmes
Göran Gustafsson
Dept of Product and Production Development, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg,
Sweden
E-mail: goran.gustafsson@me.chalmers.se
Dava J. Newman
Dept of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA,
USA
E-mail: dnewman@MIT. EDU
Sven Stafström
Dept of Physics, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
E-mail: sst@ifm.liu.se
Hans Peter Wallin
Dept of Vehicle Engineering, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
E-mail: hp@fkt.kth.se
Keywords: CDIO, syllabus, first-year course, engineering education, projects
SUMMARY: This paper presents a part of the ongoing Conceive – Design – Implement – Operate
(CDIO) Program for Engineering Education Reform, which is run by Chalmers University of
Technology, the Royal Institute of Technology and Linköping University, all in Sweden, and
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, USA. The CDIO Program is supported by the Knut
and Alice Wallenberg foundation and aims at developing a new model for engineering education,
focusing on CDIO skills. In the paper we present and discuss first-year introductory courses in
engineering education programmes at the four universities from a CDIO perspective, with an
emphasis on the student projects in these courses.
1. INTRODUCTION
In pre Second World War academic engineering education elements of hands-on practice and
scientific fundamentals were generally well balanced. The teachers were many times practicing
engineers themselves who focused on solving concrete engineering problems, which helped the
students learn to conceptualise and design products and systems. During the post Second World
War era the rapid expansion of scientific and technical knowledge has however seen engineering
education evolve into the teaching of engineering science with less emphasis on engineering
practice. However, it has become apparent that engineers need more than pure technical
knowledge in order to find good and viable solutions to the complex technical problems they are
facing today, so this has lead to an increased concern in the industry that graduating students,
while technically adept, lack many other important skills. There is hence a need for a new model
for engineering education that integrates the basic skills by focusing on the conception, design,
1
implementation and operation (CDIO) of technical systems at the same time as it stimulates the
development of other personal and interpersonal skills.
A group of university engineering educators started to examine this issue in the late 1990s.
Their work has resulted in a new approach to engineering education, the aim of which can be
stated: Graduating engineers should be able to Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate complex
value-added engineering systems in a modern, team-based environment. This approach has
become known as CDIO. A detailed educational syllabus of it has been developed [3] and is
displayed in condensed form in Table 1.
The CDIO is an open architecture endeavour that is specifically designed for, and offered to,
all university engineering programmes to customize and adapt to their specific needs. The vision
of the CDIO is to provide students with an education that stresses fundamental engineering
systems. This is essential to sustaining productivity, innovation and excellence in a future that is
increasingly based on technologically complex systems.
The new educational model is integrated, with mutually supporting disciplines and a multitude
of projects. Students learn experientially about system building through team-based design-buildoperate projects and develop a deep working knowledge of the fundamentals. This is particularly
important nowadays when we can no longer expect the students arriving at the universities to have
the hands-on experiences of earlier generations that provides the necessary foundation upon which
to base the forming and testing of hypotheses in an abstract fashion.
Since 1 October 2000, Chalmers University of Technology (Chalmers), the Royal Institute of
Technology (KTH), Linköping University (LiU), all in Sweden, and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), MA, USA have been running a joint four-year program aimed at developing a
new model for engineering education, focusing on CDIO skills. The concept is characterized by a
curriculum organized around the various disciplines while emphasizing that engineering is about
projects, a pedagogic model that supports active, experiential group learning, a varied learning
environment with classrooms, workshops and the outside world as well as a continuous
improvement process. The CDIO Program for Engineering Education Reform is supported by the
Swedish Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation.
First-year introductory courses are common in engineering education programmes. This paper
presents a study of four first-year introductory courses, one at each of the universities that
participate in the CDIO Program. The courses are discussed with an emphasis on the student
projects in them. (Gustafsson et al. [4] have treated other aspects of the same courses in a recent
paper.)
2. FIRST-YEAR INTRODUCTORY COURSES
The four first-year courses that will be discussed are:
● Introduction to Mechanical Engineering (Chalmers)
● Perspective of Vehicle Engineering (KTH)
● Introduction to Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering (LiU)
● Introduction to Aerospace and Design (MIT)
All courses are part of an engineering programme first-year curriculum at the respective
university, and the objective of each of them is to attract students to engineering and to motivate
them for engineering studies, as well as support the learning of CDIO skills. Since they are among
the first building blocks of the curricula they are very important in that respect. The intention is to
accomplish the aims by introducing the students to the disciplines that will follow, giving them
some confidence in handling basic tools and theories and providing a motivational link for their
chosen academic careers. Four different areas of engineering are represented among the courses,
and each course naturally contains elements that are specific to its particular area. Subject-specific
2
1
TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE AND REASONING
1.1 KNOWLEDGE OF UNDERLYING SCIENCES
1.2 CORE ENGINEERING FUNDAMENTAL
KNOWLEDGE
1.3 ADVANCED ENGINEERING FUNDAMENTAL
KNOWLEDGE
2
PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL SKILLS AND
ATTRIBUTES
2.1 ENGINEERING REASONING AND PROBLEM
SOLVING
2.1.1 Problem Identification and Formulation
2.1.2 Modeling
2.1.3 Estimation and Qualitative Analysis
2.1.4 Analysis With Uncertainty
2.1.5 Solution and Recommendation
2.2 EXPERIMENTATION AND KNOWLEDGE
DISCOVERY
2.2.1 Hypothesis Formulation
2.2.2 Survey of Print and Electronic Literature
2.2.3 Experimental Inquiry
2.2.4 Hypothesis Test and Defense
2.3 SYSTEM THINKING
2.3.1 Thinking Holistically
2.3.2 Emergence and Interactions in Systems
2.3.3 Prioritization and Focus
2.3.4 Trade-offs, Judgment and Balance in
Resolution
2.4 PERSONAL SKILLS AND ATTRIBUTES
2.4.1 Initiative and Willingness to Take Risks
2.4.2 Perseverance and Flexibility
2.4.3 Creative Thinking
2.4.4 Critical Thinking
2.4.5 Awareness of One’s Personal
Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes
2.4.6 Curiosity and Lifelong Learning
2.4.7 Time and Resource Management
2.5 PROFESSIONAL SKILLS AND ATTITUDES
2.5.1 Professional Ethics, Integrity,
Responsibility and Accountability
2.5.2 Professional Behavior
2.5.3 Proactively Planning for One’s Career
2.5.4 Staying Current on World of Engineering
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INTERPERSONAL SKILLS: TEAMWORK AND
COMMUNICATION
3.1 TEAMWORK
3.1.1 Forming Effective Teams
3.1.2 Team Operation
3.1.3 Team Growth and Evolution
3.1.4 Leadership
3.1.5 Technical Teaming
3.2 COMMUNICATIONS
3.2.1 Communications Strategy
3.2.2 Communications Structure
3.2.3 Written Communication
3.2.4 Electronic/Multimedia Communication
3.2.5 Graphical Communication
3.2.6 Oral Presentation and Inter-Personal
Communications
3.3 COMMUNICATION IN FOREIGN LANGUAGES
3.3.1 Communication in English
3.3.2 Communication in Intra-EU Languages
3.3.3 Communication in Extra-EU Languages
4
CONCEIVING, DESIGNING, IMPLEMENTING
AND OPERATING SYSTEMS IN THE
ENTERPRISE AND SOCIETAL CONTEXT
4.1 EXTERNAL AND SOCIETAL CONTEXT
4.1.1 Roles and Responsibility of Engineers
4.1.2 The Impact of Engineering on Society
4.1.3 Society’s Regulation of Engineering
4.1.4 The Historical and Cultural Context
4.1.5 Contemporary Issues and Values
4.1.6 Developing a Global Perspective
4.2 ENTERPRISE AND BUSINESS CONTEXT
4.2.1 Appreciating Different Enterprise Cultures
4.2.2 Enterprise Strategy, Goals and Planning
4.2.3 Technical Entrepreneurship
4.2.4 Working Successfully in Organizations
4.3 CONCEIVING AND ENGINEERING SYSTEMS
4.3.1 Setting System Goals and Requirements
4.3.2 Defining Function, Concept and Architecture
4.3.3 Modeling of System and Insuring Goals
Can Be Met
4.3.4 Development Project Management
4.4 DESIGNING
4.4.1 The Design Process
4.4.2 The Design Process Phasing and
Approaches
4.4.3 Utilization of Knowledge in Design
4.4.4 Disciplinary Design
4.4.5 Multidisciplinary Design
4.4.6 Multi-Objective Design (DFX)
4.5 IMPLEMENTING
4.5.1 Designing the Implementation Process
4.5.2 Hardware Manufacturing Process
4.5.3 Software Implementing Process
4.5.4 Hardware Software Integration
4.5.5 Test, Verification, Validation and Certification
4.5.6 Implementation Management
4.6 OPERATING
4.6.1 Designing and Optimizing Operations
4.6.2 Training and Operations
4.6.3
Supporting the System Lifecycle
4.6.4
System Improvement and Evolution
4.6.5
Disposal and Life-End Issues
4.6.6
Operations Management
Table 1. Condensed CDIO Syllabus, showing three levels of content detail [3].
3
differences are outside the scope of this paper, and the limited space available here only permits a
discussion of a few aspects of the general contents of the courses from a CDIO perspective. (The
CDIO version of the MIT course has been taught with continuous improvements for eight years
and is detailed in [6].)
At MIT the students spend 140 hours on their first-year course. At Chalmers and LiU the
corresponding time is 160 hours, and at KTH it is 240 hours. These numbers correspond to 2-3 %
of the respective engineering programme curriculum. The three Swedish courses have up to about
three times as many students (150-170) as the MIT course (60), while the latter has a notably
greater fraction of female students (33% versus 10-20%).
2.1. General CDIO first-year course contents
The contents of the four first-year courses with respect to the CDIO Syllabus are presented in
Table 2, which is a condensed version of a more extensive description [1]. In the table we
distinguish between the three levels Introduce (I), Teach (T) and Utilize (U) to describe the detail
of treatment of each CDIO Syllabus subtopic. The level Teach presupposes the level Introduce,
and in short the differences between the three levels can be described as follows:
Introduce: Briefly touch on or expose the students to. Less than one hour of course time
dedicated to the topic, and no specific learning objective or knowledge retention linked to it.
Example: Without treatment of ethics in general, present an ethical problem to the students to set
the context for a lecture on the subject.
Teach: Try to make the students learn the material. At least one hour of course time dedicated
to the topic, with the objective to advance the students’ learning at least one cognitive level.
Example: Explicit presentation of the methodology and tools of product design, which is then
practised by the students in assignments.
Utilize: Assumes some knowledge of the topic, but no course time is explicitly allotted to
teaching it. No specific learning objective, but use of the topic to reach other learning objectives.
Example: In lab work students are expected to utilize their skills in experimentation, but no
explicit instruction on the subject is given.
Table 2 shows that the four first-year courses treat many of the CDIO Syllabus topics. All
address three of the four top-level items of the syllabus, i.e. items 2-4. At the next lower level
notably subtopic 2.1, Engineering Reasoning & Problem Solving, is taught in all the four courses,
and the same is true for item 3.2, Communications, which is also utilized in three courses.
Subtopic 3.1, Teamwork, is taught in three of the four courses and utilized in all of them. The only
subtopic at the same level that is not explicitly treated in any of the courses is 3.3, Communication
in Foreign Languages. However, it should be noted that this item is generally and implicitly
treated in Swedish engineering education in that English textbooks and software are common in
the courses and otherwise considered standard means.
2.2. First-year course projects and their roles
All the four courses contain projects of various kinds that are (in most cases) carried out by teams
of students. The number and nature of the projects is different from course to course, but the
common aim is to let the students practise their knowledge and gain confidence. In total the
students devote about 50% of the course time to these projects.
The Chalmers course contains two half-semester projects. The first one is the writing of an essay
on a technical subject. Each student team works on a specific subject and is provided with a few
references to relevant background material as a start. The teams then use modern library search
tools to find more, relevant literature themselves and they produce a written report on the subject
that complies with common standards for documents of this kind. A linguist scrutinizes the reports
and proposes ample and necessary changes before they are approved. Finally, each team presents
the contents of its report in a seminar and is criticized by the fellow student teams in the same
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FIRST-
INTRODUCE/
EMPHASIZED
YEAR
TEACH/
SUBTOPICS IN
CDIO SYLLABUS ITEM
COURSE
UTILIZE
CDIO SYLLABUS
2.1 Engineering Reasoning
Chalmers
T
2.1.1, 2.1.5
& Problem Solving
KTH
T
2.1.1-5
LiU
T
2.1.1-5
MIT
T
2.1.1-3
2.2 Experimentation &
Chalmers
T, U
2.2.2
Knowledge Discovery
KTH
T, U
2.2.1-2, 2.2.4
LiU
T
2.2.4
MIT
I
2.2.3
Chalmers
I
2.3.1, 2.3.4
KTH
T
2.3.1, 2.3.3-4
LiU
T
2.3.2
MIT
T
2.3.2-4
2.4 Personal Skills &
Chalmers
I
2.4.3-4, 2.4.6-7
Attitudes
KTH
I
2.4.3-4, 2.4.6
LiU
T
2.4.3-4, 2.4.7
MIT
T
2.4.4-5
2.5.4
2.3 System Thinking
2.5 Professional Skills &
Chalmers
Attitudes
KTH
I
LiU
I
MIT
I
2.5.1-2
Chalmers
T, U
3.1.2
KTH
I, U
3.1.2
LiU
T, U
3.1.2-5
MIT
T, U
3.1.2-5
Chalmers
T, U
3.2.3, 3.2.5-6
KTH
T, U
3.2.3, 3.2.5-6
LiU
T, U
3.2.3, 3.2.6
MIT
T, U
3.2.4, 3.2.6
4.1 Societal & External
Chalmers
T
4.1.1-2, 4.1.4-6
Context
KTH
T
4.1.1-6
LiU
I
4.1.1-6
MIT
I
4.1.1-6
3.1 Teamwork
3.2 Communications
4.2 Enterprise &
Chalmers
Business Context
KTH
I
4.2.2
LiU
I
4.2.4
4.3.1-2
MIT
4.3 Conceiving &
Chalmers
T, U
Engineering Systems
KTH
I
LiU
T
4.3.1, 4.3.4
MIT
T
4.3.2
Chalmers
T, U
4.4.1-2
KTH
I
LiU
I
MIT
T, U
4.4 Designing
4.5 Implementing
4.4.1-5
Chalmers
KTH
4.6 Operating
LiU
I
MIT
I
4.5.2, 4.5.5
Chalmers
KTH
LiU
I
MIT
T,U
4.6.1-2
Table 2. Contents of first-year courses.
5
course. In the second Chalmers project each student team designs a (mechanical) product that
fulfils a perceived need. A typical task can e.g. be to design a brake system for prams. Apart from
literature searches in general the students may here also have to survey commercially available
solutions or find and integrate already existing sub assemblies into their own designs. Each team
presents its result in a written report which is peer reviewed in a seminar.
The course projects are intended to train the students’ ability to formulate design problems and
design requirements, search for information, perform a functional analysis, create alternative
designs, evaluate alternative solutions to design problems and choose a suitable concept, as well as
their ability to work in project teams and their skills in oral and written presentation and critique of
work done by others.
The KTH course contains three projects which each runs for one third of a semester. The first
one is concerned with experimental methodology. The student teams experimentally determine
mathematical relationships between parameters in a given physical problem and present their
findings in a written report. The second project is a more advanced version of the first, with higher
requirements on the written report and an additional oral presentation to the fellow student teams.
The students are encouraged to employ computerized support in their presentations. The third
KTH project is a teacher supported self-study course in the MATLAB® computation and
simulation package. The students use the package to individually solve a given technical problem
and arrive at a virtual model that is then presented orally. About ten students work on the same
problem, although in contrast to the previous two projects the students here do not belong to any
formal teams. They are however free to collaborate with each other if they so wish to solve the
given problem.
The KTH course project structure resembles a three-stage rocket, which intends to give the
students experience and understanding of the abstract concept of a model, as well as develop their
creativity and a positive attitude to experimentation.
At KTH, as well as at Chalmers, the projects are rotated, alternated or partly replaced every
year to get a continuous renewal of the project catalogues.
The LiU course has just been developed and will be run for the first time during the academic
year 2002-2003. 2-4 different teams will work independently on the same project during a full
semester, and towards the end of the course have a preparatory meeting where they present their
findings to each other and discuss them. The course ends with a written report from each team and
a ‘project conference’ in three parallel sessions where all projects are presented. The project
reports are scrutinized to ascertain that they meet certain requirements on the quality of technical
content as well as language.
The aims of the LiU project work are to give the students an insight into the role of the
professional engineer by introducing engineering concepts and work methods, in particular models
for project work and management, and to train their capability to work in teams and present results
orally and in writing.
In the MIT course the student team project has for many years been to design a lighter-than-air
radio-controlled blimp [7], build it from standard materials and race it around a course with as
large payload as possible in the shortest amount of time. (Competitions between student-built
devices are popular in engineering education, see e.g. [5].) All student teams thus work on the
same problem, and the work goes on for almost a full semester. Partway through the project as
well as at the end of it the students give two very short oral reviews of their designs and write up
and turn in design portfolios on their ideas, sketches, meeting notes, reflective thoughts etc.
The MIT project work aims are to introduce the students to the design-build-operate cycle in
aerospace engineering.
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2.3. First-year course project team size and selection
Teams consisting of two students each have during several years performed the Chalmers essay
projects. In the next run of the Chalmers first-year course, during the academic year 2002-2003,
the team size will however be increased to three students, primarily to ease the workload on the
teachers who scrutinize and grade the reports. The students are assigned to their teams by the
supervising teachers, and mainly at random. The Chalmers design project teams consist of 4-5
students. The supervisors, who also propose the projects, assign the students to these teams too.
However, the students are encouraged to come up with alternative project ideas, and a self-selected
team that presents a realistic alternative problem to work on (which e.g. must admit a mechanical
solution) is allowed to do that.
In the first KTH course project the students work in self-selected teams consisting of two
people each, whereas in the second project the team size is increased to three people. As
mentioned earlier, all students carry out the third and final KTH project individually, although they
are welcome to informally collaborate with each other if they want to do that.
LiU plans to let the instructors in its new first-year course assign the students onto project
teams consisting of 5-6 students each. MIT has an identical procedure in its blimp project, but with
some adjustment of who is on each team to try to accommodate common meeting times between
students. MIT has over the years often also tried to pair up female students in the teams to avoid a
many-male-vs-one-female problem, but the results of this are not conclusive.
3. DISCUSSION
First-year introductory courses in engineering programmes are an ideal testing ground for the
CDIO approach, where the new ideas can be tried, developed and assessed to support the learning
of CDIO skills. Project work carried out by team of students in these courses are very much in line
with the CDIO vision of a pedagogic model that supports active, experiential and group learning.
The four courses that are discussed in this paper all contain projects of that sort. The number of
projects as well as their nature and themes, team size etc. is different from course to course, but a
common aim with the projects is to let the students practise their knowledge and gain confidence.
In the three CDIO Program universities that already run first-year courses (LiU will begin
during the academic year 2002-2003) the experiences from the projects in them are very positive.
The students seem to appreciate the possibilities to try and develop their own ideas in a project.
According to West 8, design projects with the ultimate goal of producing a ‘paper design’ are
fundamentally limited in the sense that students are unable to verify their solutions themselves. It
is important for increased student motivation and confidence that at the end of a project something
will ‘work’. LiU, KTH and MIT all have newly constructed classrooms and laboratories to
facilitate design projects and active learning methods, and during the academic year 2002-2003
Chalmers will follow suit. Its first-year course puts emphasis on teaching the formal design
process, how to set requirements and goals and how to create solutions that meet them, and a
prototype laboratory for use by the students will now be equipped which will make it possible to
extend the projects from the present final drawings into the building and operating phase.
At KTH the students have also expressed their appreciation of the closer contacts with the
departments and the supervisors that the projects bring, and assessment has made clear that the
blimp project at MIT has improved the students’ comfort level working on ‘open’ technical
problems. At the same time as the students seem to have had great fun and satisfaction, the project
has also significantly increased their grasp of how to design and build a device from an assortment
of parts (statistical significance has been determined by the McNemar Test [2] and is detailed in
[6]).
A complete engineering programme should of course cover all topics in the CDIO Syllabus,
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but a single course can only cover some of them. A question is then how to design this educational
puzzle, i.e. how to ‘distribute’ the CDIO Syllabus items among the courses in the programme, and
the project(s) in the first-year course, to best support the students’ learning. This can certainly be
done in more than one way in an engineering programme, but the first-year course is very
important in that it is among the very first pieces of the educational puzzle that is laid out. A welldesigned first-year course, which addresses those CDIO Syllabus topics that are the most
important for the student to learn early on, stimulates him/her and is linked to the following
courses, is a tremendous asset to an engineering programme. The CDIO Syllabus is a valuable tool
that makes it easier to see the pattern in a programme and in a course and how to best design the
first important building blocks. There may well be overlaps among the courses, but there must not
be any gaps between them.
4. CONCLUSION
In the CDIO Program for Engineering Education Reform we will continue to learn from each
other’s good examples. Our aim is not to arrive at a ‘standard’ first-year course curriculum or
project to be used at all universities, but rather to improve all the four first-year courses at the same
time as the individual characteristics of each of them are preserved. We have identified projects as
an important part of all four courses in that they provide opportunities to address and combine
many CDIO Syllabus topics at the same time as they motivate the students. Teamwork is an
important subject, which we could systematically strengthen by developing a new ‘learning
module’ to be used by all. Another equally important subject is communication, which could be
similarly strengthened. Tentative topics for further discussion in the Program are also team
selection and team size, how the individual first-year course goals fit in with the CDIO Syllabus
and other courses in the same engineering educational programme, and how to efficiently assess
the affective goal of the first-year courses of increasing student motivation.
References:
1 Benchmark table for first-year courses. CDIO Project document. Chalmers University of
Technology, 2002.
2 Conover, W.J.: Practical Nonparametric Statistics, 2nd Ed. Wiley & Sons, 1980, pp. 130-133.
3 Crawley, E.: The CDIO Syllabus: A Statement of Goals for Undergraduate Engineering
Education. MIT CDIO Report #1, Dept of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2001.
4 Gustafsson, G., Malmqvist, J., Newman, D. J., Stafström, S., Wallin, H. P.: Towards a new
model for first-year introductory courses in engineering education programmes. NordDesign 2002,
Trondheim, Norway, 14-16 August 2002.
5 Hurst, K., James, R. D., Raines, M.: The Progressive Use of Projects in an Engineering
Degree Course. The International Journal of Mechanical Engineering Education, 21(4): 373-379,
1993.
6 Newman, D. J., Amir, A. R.: Innovative First Year Aerospace Design Course at MIT. ASEE
Journal of Engineering Education, 90(3): 375-381, July 2001.
7 Newman, D. J.: Interactive Aerospace Engineering and Design, Introductory textbook with
accompanying CD-ROM multimedia. McGraw-Hill, 2002.
8 West, H.: A Criticism of an Undergraduate Design Curriculum. Design Theory &
Methodology, DE-Vol. 31:7-12, ASME, 1991.
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