In September 2004, a NSF sponsored collaborative project (hence after referred to as the DLR project), involving engineering and education faculty members at Virginia Tech (VT), was launched to undertake department-level reform (DLR) of the freshman engineering (also called General Engineering (GE)) within the Department of Engineering Education (EngE) and the bioprocess engineering option within the Biological Systems Engineering (BSE) program using a theme based spiral curriculum approach. This project follows a planning grant from the NSF (i.e., Bridges for Engineering Education–Virginia Tech (BEEVT)) [1]. The goal of BEEVT was to initiate long-lasting collaborative relationships among VT engineering and education faculty, K-12 educators, corporations, and policy/decision makers throughout Virginia and the DLR project represents an initial success of this collaborative.