ENHANCING DESIGN EDUCATION BY PRODUCT REVERSE ENGINEERING
As science and technology develops faster and faster, the accumulation of knowledge is exponential over time. Engineering education must keep up with the changing environment including engineering practice. As each individual’s capability is limited, engineering students need choosing right stuff to learn so that they can graduate as qualified engineers with both broad knowledge and practical skills as required in industry. In this paper, the current engineering education is discussed with some trends, such as creativity training as most have insisted in project-based hands-on design education, broad knowledge including essential engineering science knowledge. As a comprehensive discipline, design engineering courses exist to teach engineering design fundamental. Due to immature design theory and methodology, the “learning by doing” approach is widely accepted to complement current engineering design education. In this paper, an integrated effort is introduced which combines together the two basic aspects, knowledge and skill, in order to increase the half-life of engineering knowledge and enhance the hands-on skills at the same time. Based on new development in design research, an experimental design education using Product Reverse Engineering (PRE) as education tool, is introduced with initial evaluation for suitability in design education.