Innovation And Integration In An In House First Year Engineering Program: A Fast Track To Engineering Enculturation

The first-year of the four-year Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) program at the University of Auckland has been taught entirely in-house by the School of Engineering since 1996, when university-wide structural changes enabled the fulfillment of “a strong desire to move students straight into the engineering way of thinking”. The changes made were seen as matching well with international calls for engineering education curriculum reform. This inhouse program is very rare in an international landscape where the majority of first-year engineering courses, are taught as service courses by faculty from mathematics and science departments with one or two design or hands-on introduction-to-engineering courses providing a taste of “real” engineering. This paper charts the evolution of that program, its strengths, challenges, weaknesses and ongoing evaluations with particular reference to innovations in delivery and assessment in the context of an integrated curriculum. The common program, taught entirely in-house, provides the opportunity for the early development of a sense of belonging and identity as an engineer. Data presented in the form of student feedback, assessment results and evaluations suggest that this program may well provide examples of best practice.