VERTICAL COORDINATION OF TECHNICAL DRAWING AND CAD COURSES IN INDUSTRIAL DESIGN ENGINEERING DEGREE

One of the challenges established in the Strategic Framework Document in reference to the Integration of the Spanish University System in the European Higher Education Area, is that the formative objectives of the Bachelor’s Degree should have a professional orientation. This would help to improve the employability of students to make possible their effective incorporation into the working market. To this end, the basic competences, the transversal competences related to the integral formation of students, and most specific competences must be integrated to provide this professional orientation to the students. With the objective of obtaining an effective learning process and ensuring the acquisition of these competences, a special effort of vertical coordination of different courses is required.

In the Bachelor’s Degree in Industrial Design and Product Development Engineering at Jaume I University (UJI) in Castellón (Spain), there are four coordinated courses related to Technical Drawing and Computer Aided Design. This work is aimed at improving the vertical coordination between these four courses developed during the first, second and third year of the Degree.

The students receive integrated training related to Technical Drawing and Computer-Aided Design through 4 semester courses. On the one hand students follow Technical Drawing and Graphics I & II (TDI and TDII), during the first year, which are focused on developing abilities of understanding spatial representation systems and sketching engineering technical drawings. In the second and third year of the degree, Computer Aided design I and Computer Aided Design II (CAD I and CAD II) courses are aimed at improving the skills acquired and generating models and drawings through the use of 2D and 3D CAD systems.

In order to obtain a progressive learning, effective coordination in methodology, objectives and evaluation stages is necessary between these courses. Thus, this paper shows the different experiences of coordination carried out to do it, focused on:
1. Preparing and updating of teaching materials. Different publications and notebooks with problems and exams to improve the self-learning have been published. Furthermore, teachers detected some mistakes in the drawings of the final degree project during the last years. To improve this, a new guide and a new methodology was developed and used in CAD II course.
2. Vertical coordinating in the use of terminology, formats and standards, common to all levels of learning. Some glossary cards have been developed and used during the last two years.
3. Improving and making consistent the assessment. The use of assessment rubrics has been introduced in some courses. In the rest, rubrics used were improved and coordinated.

In order to achieve more advanced contents to provide a more professional orientation to the students, a final graphical project is developed by students at each of the different coordinated courses, increasing progressively the level of difficulty regarding the methods and tools used. Thus, at the end of the Bachelor’s Degree, students are ready to design a product, applying their acquired skills, from the basic ones (sketching engineering technical drawings) to the most professional ones (developing advanced 3D models) .