Christopher D. Hall

Aerospace and Ocean Engineering

VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE Blacksburg, Virginia24061-0203USA

AND STATE UNIVERSITY (540) 231-2314 Fax: (540) 231-9632 E-mail:

June 7, 2004

MEMORANDUM

TO:R. Walters

FROM:C. Hall

SUBJECT:Trip Report on CDIO Workshop, June 1-4, 2004

I traveled to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland to participate in a CDIO Workshop and Collaborators Meeting from June 1 – 4, 2004. In this trip report I describe CDIO, the Workshop, and the Collaborators Meeting, and make recommendations about VT’s participation in the CDIO program.

CDIO is an acronym for Conceive, Design, Implement, Operate. The CDIO program was initiated by a consortium of universities as a new approach to undergraduate engineering education. The four initial universities included three Swedish schools and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The three Swedish schools are Chalmers Institute of Technology, LinköpingUniversity, and the Royal Institute of Technology. Additional universities have joined the consortium: Queen’s University, Ontario; Queen’s University, Belfast; Technical University of Denmark; U.S. Naval Academy; University of Liverpool; and University of Pretoria.

CDIO is intended “to create a rational, complete, universal, and generalizable set of goals for undergraduate engineering education.” The program is founded on the idea that

Graduating engineers should be able to
Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate
complex value-added engineering systems
in a modern team-based environment.

The program includes a generic Syllabus, guidelines for establishing CDIO programs within specific curricula, Implementation Kits, and Instructor Resource Modules. In many ways, the program reflects the ABET 2000 a-k mapping, but is more comprehensive and includes a mechanism for determining the level of treatment of specific topics.

The CDIO Workshop was a one-day series of presentations to introduce the CDIO program to new prospective collaborators. There is a “canned” presentation called Ready to Engineer, which I will obtain and present to interested faculty.

The CDIO Collaborators Meeting was a three-day series of presentations and breakout sessions to report on CDIO progress, to make further progress, and to plan for subsequent meetings. The collaborators are loosely divided into six groups: Curriculum, Teaching & Learning, Assessment, Workspace, Dissemination, and Students. Each of these groups was responsible for leading one plenary session at the meeting.

Additionally, there was a session where potential new collaborators gave presentations about their programs and the potential for CDIO implementation. I gave a presentation on VT, emphasizing the design-build elements from the EF course through the extracurricular projects in AOE. There was significant interest in our experience with vertical integration in our senior design projects, and no other university appeared to have much experience with this concept.

There was also an excellent presentation for potential collaborators given by Daryl Boden, AE Chair at the U.S. Naval Academy, describing the USNA approach to implementing CDIO. Combined with the MIT implementation described in the CDIO Syllabus Report, there is ample evidence of the generalizability of the CDIO concept.

Recommendation: I think that VT AOE is already on the CDIO track, and that we can benefit substantially from the formalism that CDIO provides, even if we do not join the CDIO group as a collaborator. We should, however, pursue a strategy of implementing CDIO in both the AE and OE B.S. programs.

Specific steps:

  1. Create a small CDIO committee. Recommended membership: Brown, Hall, Mason, Neu. Others? Should the Engineering Education Department be involved? CEUT?
  2. The CDIO committee reviews the CDIO Syllabus Report, and develops a plan for implementation in both programs. July – September 2004.
  3. The CDIO committee presents the plan to the rest of the faculty. October 2004.
  4. The AOE faculty decide how to proceed with (or without) CDIO.

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