Experiential Learning Theory and the Teaching of Software Intensive Courses
A. Richard Vannozzi · 2025
Session: Tools, techniques, and best practices of engineering education for the digital generationEach year, pressure seems to grow to bring more software into our teaching.There are three forces at work in engineering education today that make a discussion of how to teach software intensive courses timely.First, initiatives such as laptops in the classroom, asynchronous and blended learning models, Web 2.0 and the multi-media classroom have all brought fundamental changes to the modern engineering learning environment.Second, the students who come to us, for the most part, are technologically savvy and have a comfort with utilizing technology in their education that often outstrips our own.Third, engineering software is the workhorse in the modern engineering practice and research environments we are preparing our students for.Software crunches our numbers, brings our ideas to life, and even controls the manufacturing and construction that springs from engineering designs.If anyone is still wondering, software is here to stay and debate no longer can center on whether we utilize software in our teaching, but rather how do we utilize software effectively in order to best help our students achieve the learning outcomes we define.To say that software centered pedagogy has replaced, or should replace other time tested pedagogies would be as naïve as it would be foolish.In the same way that not all tasks a practicing engineer does in their workday are centered on software, not all learning is best accomplished using a software platform.Similarly, some tasks are so software intensive that to try and teach them without software would be ludicrous.This paper focuses on two such specific aspects of engineering education where software is essential.The first is, by its name and nature software intensive, that being Computer Aided Design (CAD) and the second is Geographic Information Systems (GIS), an example of the database driven modeling environments that are growing in use in nearly all domains of engineering.