If you could provide me with any feedback about the quality of the survey
as well, I would appreciate it very much. I plan on sending this out to
undergraduates in engineering as well as engineering educators and
practicing engineers who are in the field.
---------------------------
Please take the time to answer the following questions. If a question does
not seem particularly relevant to your circumstances, skip it and go to the
next one.
What area of engineering is your specialty? (e.g., mechanical, electrical)
Do you consider yourself primarily an engineering practitioner, student, or
educator?
Do you have a bachelor's, master's, or Ph.D. in engineering?
If you are still in school, how many engineering-related courses have you taken?
If you are still in school, how many years until you graduate?
Engineering as an occupation
How much of your job requires you to rely on visual or graphic information
(rather than text)? Try to indicate you answer in both time and level of
importance. (For example, this could be time spent making a drawing or
viewing a colleague's PowerPoint presentation.)
Many engineers communicate with other designers by drawing pictures while
they speak. How common do you engage in drawing pictures? (For example,
many designers send drawings back and forth to one another as they make
contributions to the final product. In informal settings, some designers
find themselves drawing on cocktail napkins as they talk.)
How would you describe the utility of this skill?
To what extent do computer-aided design technologies limit a designer and
to what extent do they enhance it? Do these technologies limit or enhance
creativity?
Do CAD systems increase the level of decision-making responsibility for the
designer? Why or why not?
Engineering education
Assume that you are responsible for listing the priorities of an
engineering curriculum. What place should the ability to read drawings and
specifications take on the list? What are the other skills or abilities
that you would list as priorities?
How much of your academic career required you to "thinking creatively,"
versus providing answers that could be arrived at by following
instructions?
In your engineering education, how much difficulty did you encounter in
reading drawings and specifications versus other learning exercises?
Is the ability to read and create drawings and specifications easy enough
that all engineers should be capable of doing so by the time they finish
college? Are some engineers better than others when it comes to reading
and creating drawings and specifications? If so, do you have any beliefs
as to why this might be the case?
How easy is it for you to translate verbal or text-based information into a
schematic or drawing? How important is this skill as an engineer? How
much time and effort should be given to it in the engineering curriculum?
How good are you at remember information visually? How important is this
skill to being an engineer? In other words, with the advent of the
computer as an extension of human memory and warehouse of visual
information, how important is it for engineers to be skilled at keeping
visual information in their heads?
How important is it to be able to draw upon stock solutions and how
important is it to come up with creative solutions?
In your engineering courses, how much time was spent learning the
profession of engineering? (Some items that might fall into this category
would be working in teams, communicating effectively, meeting deadlines,
interpreting client needs/wants/desires, etc.)
Please read the following excerpt:
"For those who find such drawings daunting, the process of understanding is
not much helped, initially, by the bewildering array of standard symbols
designed to reduce drawing time and to avoid ambiguity. The thousands of
standard graphic symbols both increase the use of visual jargon and make it
easier for initiates to decode drawings. Dozens of different symbols are
used to tell welders what kind of welded seam is required. Symbols have
been standardized for particular devices, such as pipe fittings, pumps,
filters, electric and electronic switches, fuses, terminals, and
connectors. Many hundreds of symbols are regularly used. For example,
about a hundred symbols are specified for heating, ventilating, and air
conditioning, including 20 different symbols for valves."
If the above statement is true, how necessary is it for engineers to hold a
"mental library" of these symbols? How helpful is it in completing their
day-to-day design tasks?
Do you think such symbols add to the clarity of a drawing or detract from it?
Does having a "mental library" of these symbols, as well as a memory of
historical artifacts important to the field, aid an engineer's level of
creativity? In other words, if an engineer has a complete mental library
of images of combustion engines, will this help the engineer in designing
new combustion engines or will it inhibit innovation?
Thank you for your cooperation. Please send your responses to Brian
McNurlen at mcnurlen who-is-at uiuc.edu.
----------------------------------------
Brian E. McNurlen <mcnurlen who-is-at uiuc.edu>
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Center for the Study of Reading
51 Gerty Drive
Champaign, IL 61820
(217) 244-6497
http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/students/mcnurlen/