A five-year working model for integrating design into the engineering curriculum

We discuss a five-year working model for integrating design into the Manufacturing Engineering Department's curriculum at Miami University. The model builds on work from other engineering institutions and coalitions as well as our own unique experience at Miami University. Our model consists of unified threads among the engineering science, manufacturing and design courses in the curriculum. These threads allow the faculty to achieve two goals: autonomy in their courses with stand alone experiences as well as links to other experiences before and after their courses. The emphasis is on defining clear roles of the courses in these integrated threads and developing unified themes, skills and strategic thinking throughout the experience. The discussion of this working model is intended to allow other engineering educators in different disciplines to use and modify the model to accommodate their own experience. To achieve that we include specific aspects of the model and the integrated threads and the time table to apply the given experience. Also, the paper explains briefly our assessment mechanism to evaluate our efforts to integrate design throughout the curriculum to satisfy the new "Engineering Topics" criteria of ABET in evaluating the design content of an engineering program.