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This paper regards the mechanical curriculum teaching as a design problem and uses environment-based design (EBD) method to solve it. First, environment components and their relations of the mechanical curriculum are found out by recursive object model (ROM). Then, conflicts in the teaching process are identified by analysing the above relations. Finally, solutions for solving these conflicts are generated. The proposed method is applied to mechanical manufacturing technology foundation (MMTF) curriculum with 217 students in grade 2016 in China. The solutions used in MMTF include decreasing the mental stress of students, developing more experimental projects, applying real cases and projects, adopting variety of assessments and so on. Compared with the performance of students in grade 2015, the average attendance rate and final scores are both increased, and three of the four achievement values of graduation attributes are risen. The practical example illustrates the EBD method is effective in improving curriculum teaching.

It is well-known that engineering is a key profession for both economic and social development. This is as true for China as it is for other countries which are in the process of development. However, what are the economic incentives for young people to enter the profession today? Currently, there are many studies of the rate of return to educational investment, but recent empirical studies of the rate of return to educational investment for engineers are uncommon. This is true generally, but especially for contemporary China. This is because it is difficult to obtain high-quality and representative sample data about engineers. This paper uses the data of the Chinese Family Panel Studies, 2010, and applies a Mincerian income function to estimate the rate of return to education for engineers who work in the private sector in urban China. The empirical results show that the rate of return for engineers is 12.3%, which is an impressive figure. It is in accordance with the current supply and demand of the Chinese labour market which requires many engineers to carry out construction and maintenance projects given China's continuing industrialisation, modernisation and urbanisation. However, the empirical results also show that compared with the rate of return to education for professional and technical personnel who are employed in business economics and finance, the rate of return for engineers is significantly lower. This may explain why in China today the attraction of engineering education for talented young people is declining, with more and more students choosing business economics and finance as their first choices of major and career, rather than engineering as in the past.

Responding to globalization trends, many engineering schools are internationalizing their courses and curricula to prepare graduates for careers that involve working across countries and cultures. As a result, both students and staff are looking beyond study abroad to international work, research, and service learning opportunities as alternate pathways for high-impact experiential learning in global context. However, such programs can also pose unique challenges related to preparing students for professional practice abroad and systematically evaluating program outcomes and impacts among students and other stakeholders. This paper responds to these challenges by reporting on International Research and Education in Engineering (IREE) 2010 China, a summer engineering research abroad program. It describes orientation strategies designed to improve student readiness for global practice, and presents mixed-method assessment methods and results for global engineering competency and other key learning outcomes. The main audience for this paper includes faculty and staff who develop and support global learning experiences in engineering and other professional degree programs.

Contribution: This paper qualitative research delineates the thinking and behavioral patterns that reflect students' advanced level of epistemological thinking in project-based learning (PBL) activities and the associated impact factors. Background: PBL has been widely adopted in engineering education for its effectiveness in improving students' problem-solving abilities, collaboration skills, and academic achievement. The four stages of Perry's theory--Dualism, Multiplicity, Relativism, and Commitment (within Relativism)--depict students' epistemological development from dualistic to contextual relativistic thinking. Prior research suggested that participation in PBL could benefit students' development to relativistic thinking--the most revolutionary change in Perry's model. Nevertheless, how epistemological thinking was exhibited in the context of PBL, and the relationship between students' epistemological thinking and PBL learning activities both remain unclear. Research Questions: 1) What are demonstrations of students' relativistic thinking in PBL activities? and 2) What are the factors in regard to students' relativistic thinking in PBL activities? Methodology: Built upon quantitative results obtained using a modified Zhang's cognitive development inventory (ZCDI) developed in the context of Perry's theory, this paper explored demonstrations of students' relativistic thinking in PBL in a qualitative manner, and analyzed the associated factors based upon one-on-one interviews with 17 engineering students. Findings: In PBL activities, students' epistemological thinking is reflected in their solving problems within constraints, conducting feasibility analyses, exhibiting commercial awareness, having their thinking broadened, and more. Their epistemological thinking can be impacted by factors, such as guidance from professors, collaborations with peers, communications with other stakeholders, and complexity level of projects.

This paper gives a brief analysis on the educational advantages and objects of NCWU. It believes that the educational philosophy and development direction of foreign school in engineering colleges must be set up on the basis of need of China and talents need, moreover, the development of the School of Foreign Studies must be analyzed by integrating into the whole development of NCWU. This paper put forwards the educational philosophy of "Drawing on Advantages, Avoiding Disadvantages, and Gearing Education to Society" and the Development Direction of "Rooted in Foreign Language and Characterised by Engineering and Business". It analyzes the problem of school of foreign studies in NCWU in Specialty Construction, teaching team and Construction of Discipline and puts forwards some solutions.

Research on engineering practice is scarce and sharing of qualitative research data can reduce the effort required for an aspiring researcher to obtain enough data from engineering workplaces to draw generalizable conclusions, both qualitative and quantitative. This paper describes how a large shareable qualitative data set on engineering practices was accumulated from 350 interviews and 12 field studies performed by the principal investigator and by students conducting PhD and capstone research projects. Ethical research practice required that sharing and reuse of qualitative data be considered from the start. The researchers' interests and methods were aligned to maintain sufficient consistency to support subsequent analysis and re-analysis of data. Analysis helped to answer questions of fundamental significance for engineering educators: what do engineers do, and why are the performances of engineering enterprises so different in South Asia compared with similar enterprises in Australia? Analysis also demonstrated the overwhelming significance of technical collaboration in engineering practice. Conceiving engineering practice as a series of technical collaboration performances requires a more elaborate understanding of social interactions than is currently the case in engineering schools. Another finding is that global engineering competency could be better described in terms of "working with people who collaborate differently". Research helped to demonstrate that formal treatment of technical collaboration in an engineering curriculum could help avoid student misconceptions about engineering practice that hinder their subsequent engineering performances.

Considering that the course group regarding theory and design of mechanisms is characterized by strong engineering application background and the students generally feel very boring and tedious during the learning process, some teaching reforms for the theory and design of mechanisms are carried out to improve the teaching effectiveness in this paper. Taking the engineering cases as the teaching objectives, we combine the course contents with the engineering background. Moreover, in order to help the students understand the knowledge difficulty and improve the design capacity of the mechanisms and machines, the MATLAB technology is introduced into the theoretical teaching to provide assisted analysis. At the same time, the MATLAB is also introduced into the practical teaching to provide theoretical guidance. The teaching effect shows that MATLAB-based teaching reform under the engineering application can deepen the understandings of course contents for students, improve the interest in learning, strengthen the design capacity and develop the innovation ability.

In May 2008, the worst earthquake in more than three decades struck southwest China, killing more than 80,000 people. The complexity of this earthquake makes it an ideal case study to clarify the intertwined issues of ethics in engineering and to help cultivate critical thinking skills. This paper first explores the need to encourage engineering ethics within a cross-cultural context. Next, it presents a systematic model for designing an engineering ethics curriculum based on moral development theory and ethic dilemma analysis. Quantitative and qualitative data from students' oral and written work were collected and analysed to determine directions for improvement. The paper also presents results of an assessment of this interdisciplinary engineering ethics course. This investigation of a disaster is limited strictly to engineering ethics education; it is not intended to assign blame, but rather to spark debate about ethical issues. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

This paper summarizes the phenomenon of offshore outsourcing and relates it to the history and current state of engineering education and the engineering profession in Europe and the USA. In order to assess the climate affecting employment decisions by and about engineers we have used as sources mostly the serious press, with an emphasis on material dating from 2004 forward. The authors conclude that despite anxiety about the out-migration of engineering and technical jobs to places such as India and China, there is reason to see offshoring as the result of Western investment in capacity building in developing countries and to believe that the creation of new jobs will outpace the rate of job loss in Europe and the USA. The paper should serve as a prod to policy-makers and educators to set about creating an environment in which highly educated engineers and technical employees can continue a pattern of economic revitalization.

Developing nations including Bangladesh are significantly lagging behind the millennium development target due to the lack of science, technology and engineering education. Bangladesh as a least developing country has only 44 engineers per million people. Its technological education and gross domestic product growth are not collinear. Although limited progress was made in humanities, basic sciences, agriculture and medical sciences, a vast gap is left in technical and engineering education. This paper describes the present condition of engineering education in the country and explores ways to improve engineering education in order to meet the national as well as global skills demand. (Contains 3 tables and 7 figures.)

The author notes that the sciences are now something one must latch onto early and successfully as a teenager, and endure against all odds. This pivotal point requires maturity and even myopia--delayed gratification and voluntary dorkiness--traits not common in the young. As a nation, Americans are losing their hegemony in the sciences. In just the past decade, China quintupled its number of doctorates in engineering and the sciences, Korea and Taiwan doubled theirs, but the U.S. stayed stable. As individuals, Americans operate more and more contraptions, but understand them less and less. While there is no single solution to the problems of the STEM pipeline--where scientific interest is squelched over time and newcomers are barred from entry--the author offers a few thoughts.

Responding to globalization trends, many engineering schools are internationalizing their courses and curricula to prepare graduates for careers that involve working across countries and cultures. As a result, both students and staff are looking beyond study abroad to international work, research, and service learning opportunities as alternate pathways for high-impact experiential learning in global context. However, such programs can also pose unique challenges related to preparing students for professional practice abroad and systematically evaluating program outcomes and impacts among students and other stakeholders. This paper responds to these challenges by reporting on International Research and Education in Engineering (IREE) 2010 China, a summer engineering research abroad program. It describes orientation strategies designed to improve student readiness for global practice, and presents mixed-method assessment methods and results for global engineering competency and other key learning outcomes. The main audience for this paper includes faculty and staff who develop and support global learning experiences in engineering and other professional degree programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although engineering education has played important roles in China’s growing power and influence on the world stage, engineering education policy since the Reform and Opening-up in the late 1970s has not been well documented in current English-language scholarship. Informed by historical and sociological studies of education, engineering and engineering education, this paper attempts to address this scholarly gap by relating contemporary Chinese engineering education policy-making to its broader historical, cultural and ideological contexts. Based on analysis of policy documents and reports released by the Chinese government and engineering schools, and drawing on prior scholarship of Chinese (engineering) education policy, this paper employs the concept of ‘past/forward’ as an analytic lens to interpret and understand four major areas of engineering education policy change in contemporary China: institutional reform, disciplines and majors, training objectives, and curriculum reform. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper maps approaches to engineering ethics in the People's Republic of China. It is addressed primarily to English-language scholars interested in learning more about one aspect of the complex historical and cultural context of technological education in a nation that now graduates more engineers than any other in the world. Although the basic terms of this mapping - i.e., traditionalism vs. modernism - will strike some non-Chinese readers as too simple, it nevertheless represents a common conceptualization within the community of discourse being presented. Engineering ethics studies in China today are constituted by a dialogue between traditional Chinese value systems concerning engineering and modernist perspectives influenced by both Marxism and more technoscientifically advanced nations as a result of global technology transfers and economic exchanges. As a preliminary exploration of this dialogue, the paper offers a historical-philosophical narrative of engineering and engineering ethics in China as reflective of traditional attitudes shaped by engineering in the premodern sense of gong cheng and its modern reinterpretation in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The paper then outlines some of the main research areas in contemporary Chinese engineering ethics studies. Finally, in the face of globalization, the traditionalism-modernism tension is used to characterize contemporary challenges in engineering ethics in China. The paper concludes with an argument addressed more to Chinese than to non-Chinese scholars, suggesting a need to rethink engineering ethics in order to redefine the meaning of 'made in China'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes the phenomenon of offshore outsourcing and relates it to the history and current state of engineering education and the engineering profession in Europe and the USA. In order to assess the climate affecting employment decisions by and about engineers we have used as sources mostly the serious press, with an emphasis on material dating from 2004 forward. The authors conclude that despite anxiety about the out-migration of engineering and technical jobs to places such as India and China, there is reason to see offshoring as the result of Western investment in capacity building in developing countries and to believe that the creation of new jobs will outpace the rate of job loss in Europe and the USA. The paper should serve as a prod to policy-makers and educators to set about creating an environment in which highly educated engineers and technical employees can continue a pattern of economic revitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese government has pointed out in relevant literature that by 2020, China is in short supply of high-level innovative technology talents, and China's engineering education will face unprecedented challenges. Based on the needs of China's future economic development, the Ministry of Education urgently launched the "Excellent Engineer Education and Training Program" in 2010, which aims to cultivate a large number of solid theoretical foundations, strong practical skills, and high innovation capabilities for the industry, the world, and the future. An outstanding engineer is the one who can quickly adapt to the needs of economic and social development. The program is divided into three levels of undergraduate, master, and doctoral training. The undergraduate level focuses on training in a series of high-quality applications capable of not only being competent in the management and marketing of the production site but also in the design, development, and operation of engineering projects. Talent: to achieve this training goal, the in-depth cooperation between schools and enterprises has become the key. In order to achieve the undergraduate-level training goals of the "Excellence Program," various local colleges and universities have adopted the method of school-enterprise cooperation, combined with their own school positioning, trying to explore a training path suitable for their own development. This research takes China's local application-oriented universities as the research object and uses the literature method to sort out and summarize the status quo of the school-enterprise cooperation in training outstanding engineers in China's local application-oriented universities. Select two different application-oriented universities located in areas with large economic development gaps, analyze their common problems, and try to put forward countermeasures and suggestions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]