Pedagogical Basis of DAS Formalism in Engineering Education

The paper presents a new approach for a bachelor-level curriculum structure in engineering. The approach is called DAS formalism according to its three phases: description, analysis and synthesis. Although developed specifically for process and environmental engineering, DAS formalism has a generic nature and it could also be used in other engineering fields. The motivation for this new curriculum structure originates from the urge to solve the problems that engineering education has faced during the past decades, e.g. student recruitment problems and dissatisfactory learning outcomes. The focus of this paper is on the structure of the curriculum but the content is also discussed when it has an effect on the structure and its implementation. The presented structure, i.e. DAS formalism, builds upon the ideas of some classical pedagogical theories, which have regularly been applied at course level but seldom used to solve curriculum-level issues. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)