Needed: A few good knights for the information age-competence, courage, and compassion in the engineering curriculum

The ABET 2000 Criteria for Engineering Programs provide us with a new roadmap for engineering education. The guidelines call for demonstrated competence in the practice of engineering. That competence includes a strong sense of how engineering practice fits into a societal framework on a local and a global level. At the same time the number of modern design tools has increased tremendously, the impact of engineering activity on the lives of everyone in society has increased, the engineering basics are unchanged and we still have only 4-5 years to prepare our students to become engineers. With new guidelines and increased demands, perhaps a modified or new approach to instruction would be helpful. The author discusses a design-based approach to teaching that meets these criteria and that also includes concepts of service and ethical responsibility. This approach has been used successfully by the author in numerous courses and has also been used very successfully to introduce environmentally responsible design practice for freshman through senior level courses.