Visualisation to enhance students' engineering design ability

One of the objectives of engineering education as per ABET is to develop design skills among students. Some universities have applied instructional strategies to teach engineering design ability and studies have shown that they have positive impact on student's learning. In spite of this, the focus on design is not common in engineering course. One possible reason is due to the specialized requirements that are difficult to implement in a traditional course - i.e. large number of specially trained teachers, infrastructure resources, lack of instructional material and pedagogical barriers such as assessment of such courses. A possible solution to address these problems is to integrate traditional instruction with visualisations such as animation, simulation and other visual learning tools. This paper suggests the use of visualisation to develop students' engineering design ability. The first step is to identify engineering design competencies and related sub-competencies. These sub-competencies serve as indicators to define the required features of visualisation. In this paper, we describe the process of identifying engineering design competencies, features of visualization which address the development of these competencies and supporting instructional activities. While most of our processes can be adapted to develop students' design competencies in any engineering course, we restrict our scope to an electronics course within an Indian university environment.