TEACHING NEW ENGINEERING STUDENTS ABOUT THE DISCIPLINES: A DISCIPLINARY OR MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACH?

Most students entering into the world of engineering encounter the difficult task of choosing an appropriate engineering discipline.How should an instructor approach this important topic?One proposed technique is to cover each discipline one at a time, giving examples of what an engineer in that discipline might do (disciplinary approach).A second proposed technique is to convey the disciplines through multidisciplinary engineering problems (multidisciplinary approach).This technique may seem desirable as a majority of engineering problems are multidisciplinary.Seeing how each type of engineer can contribute to the solution of an engineering problem could be an effective method of getting a general idea of what engineers in each discipline do.Each of these techniques (disciplinary and multidisciplinary) was used in consecutive years in an introductory engineering course at the University at Buffalo.Data was taken to measure the effectiveness of each of these techniques.The data shows that, despite the attractiveness of the multidisciplinary approach, the students did not gain as much insight into each of the engineering disciplines as they did using the disciplinary approach.This paper will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each technique as well as what we have learned by introducing methodical changes in these techniques over the past several years.