WIP: Industry-based Focus to Engineering Statics Instruction Using a Drafter/Checker Approach

This work in progress, innovative practice paper involves highlighting an engineering industry-norm strategy using a drafter/checker roles approach. Specifically, an undergraduate, engineering classroom is treated similarly to a company engineering design team. Active, collaborative learning with a student-centered experiential approach that emulates the engineering industry is the focus of the project that is used during a freshman engineering class at a large, public R1 and HSI university in the southern U.S. In the engineering design industry, drafters create engineering drawings and engineers serve as checkers and approvers of the engineering drawings. This strategy will be simulated in a freshman engineering mechanics class to prepare students for work in the engineering industry, namely for two statics homework assignments. Quantitative data analysis using a survey and comparing normalized homework scores for students in a control class without the drafter/checker methodology and a class taught by the same instructor that uses the drafter/checker approach were compared. The results indicate that the drafter/checker approach showed statistically higher homework scores for the treatment group in the particle statics assignment, but statistically similar outcomes compared with the control group for the rigid body statics assignment. Students expressed high satisfaction ratings using the drafter/checker method, especially for the communication and teamwork survey questions. Bringing ideas of working in industry into a freshman-level engineering class may serve to enhance students' preparedness to enter the engineering industry upon graduation and help reduce the industry-academia knowledge gap that many companies are experiencing today.