

In that study, the authors presented the results of a survey about different issues carried out on over 600 teachers. An analysis of the situation of CAD teaching in Spain (Rubio Garcı́a R, Gallego Santos R, Suárez Quirós J, Álvarez Peñı́n PI, 2005) showed that, since the Organic Law of Universities Footnote 1 came into force, each teacher uses different methodologies and tools to teach CAD.
Autocad 2011 assessment test software#
From the point of view that today’s student is tomorrow’s engineer, descriptions have also been put forward regarding what CAD curricula should be like depending on the role CAD will play in the student’s future (as a user, an application developer, a software developer or a CAD manager) (Ye, Peng, Chen, & Cai, 2004). Furthermore, some studies (Field, 2004) emphasise the importance of continuing evolution in the training and educational needs of users of CAD systems. The teaching of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is such a broad field of study (Asperl, 2005) that there is no consensus about what to include in the curricula, since these differ depending on the degree and on the level and age of the CAD learners. A detailed chronological description of the actions that were carried out, the implied motivations and both the expected results and those actually obtained are presented.

The main actions were to develop self-learning material and to use rubrics for assessment, together with an increase in the level of difficulty in some parts of the evaluation. Encouraged by the good results, throughout the following year, more changes were made in order to further improve the learning experience. We took the figure of the teacher-researcher as our own, owing to our conviction that teachers themselves must study their own work and reflect on it critically. In the first year, an experiment based on the AR methodology was planned and put into practice. The project was carried out over a two-year period, after detecting that academic results were not very good even when the course was not very demanding. Several studies have been published about CAD curricula, yet to the best of our knowledge nothing on applying Action Research (AR) to CAD teaching. It was implemented in a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) course on the Bachelor’s Degree in Industrial Design and Product Development Engineering. A project involving innovation in university education is described in this paper.
