UNFOLDING CERTAIN ENGINEERING PROCESSES IN A LECTUREBASED ENGINEERING COURSE

This paper presents the experiences of the introduction of some steps of “Conceive” and “Implementation” stage of the real-world engineering processes in a traditional lecture-based course, called Electromechanical Transmission Control, to develop the student competencies, such as system thinking, engineering reasoning and knowledge discovery. To intensify the understanding and perception of the technical fundamentals, a series of experiments are also scheduled in this course. In the lecture session, inquiring-based learning and designdirected learning are adopted to stress the design directive or requirement specification defining of “Conceive” stage. Meanwhile, in the series of laboratory work, the validation against the requirement of “Implementation” stage is unfolded in some sense with the different instruction in the before, during and after phase of the whole experiment process. Based on a set of validation experiments, a small-scale design-build-test project is arranged by the end of the course to enhance the students’ engineering experience and skill. The enthusiasm shown by most of the students and well presented reports are very positive to our reform attempt.