Our faculty have always been very student-oriented. However, this program creates an environment where teachers are even more involved with students. Faculty who teach in this program have weekly meetings where students who are having difficulty are often discussed by name. The integrated freshman curriculum is shown in Table 1. The new curriculum integrates engineering, math, chemistry, and physics and incorporates an engineering design project during the freshman year.
All classes rely heavily on cooperative learning techniques.
The engineering component of the new curriculum includes extensive training in team skills as well as creative problem solving skills and engineering design. The traditional chemistry, physics, and mathematics courses are also modified where appropriate to relate topics in one course to another. Faculty teaching all these courses function as a team themselves and meet regularly to assure that courses are being effectively integrated. The objective of the integrated sophomore curriculum is to strengthen student's knowledge of mathematics, while providing a broad base of engineering fundamentals. The integrated courses in the sophomore curriculum are shown in Table 2.