Information about the paper titled "THE ROLE OF SKETCHING IN ENGINEERING DESIGN AND ITS PRESENCE ON ENGINEERING EDUCATION" at IATED Digital Library

Visual literacy is essential for engineers. Technological professions have important visual characterization, both in the transmission of information and problem-solving. This means that future engineers must be proficient at communicating, thinking, and learning visually. However, engineering curricula takes partially the need to have visually literate students. The VLEE project was established to develop learning resources to enhance engineers’ visual skills and abilities. VLEE recently published the ‘Visual literacy for Engineering Education Competence Framework’, which, for the first time, addresses visual literacy learning specific to engineering. Our approach offers new opportunities for engineering students, following competency-based education, and attempts to contribute to a campus-wide collaborative effort to develop students’ communication, learning, and critical thinking skills using visual materials. This guide is considered relevant for all educators and experts in engineering education in order to help them successfully tackle the challenges that future professionals will inevitably face in the 21st century.

The importance of having engineering students proficient in visual literacy has long been recognized. Within this objective, the role of freehand drawing is paramount. It is, therefore, important to reinforce its practice for engineering communication and visual thinking support. This paper reports the findings of a research project aimed at studying the visual literacy skills of engineering students and the use of freehand drawing for this purpose. This exploratory study focuses on visualization and its externalization through freehand drawing. An empirical study was conducted with 66 engineering students from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain). Their skills for expressing visualized images through freehand drawing and their tendency to use drawings for problem-solving were evaluated. The findings of the study indicate that students generally lack skills in expressing ideas through freehand drawing. Additionally, they do not tend to apply drawing when finding solutions to given problems. Considering the importance of freehand drawing to reinforce visual literacy, the implementation of its practice is encouraged in order to have students competent in thinking and communicating through these means.

Information about the paper titled "SPANISH ENGINEERING GRAPHIC EXPRESSION SUBJECTS AND ITS RELATION TO CREATIVITY COMPETENCE" at IATED Digital Library