Goals:

1. Provide resources to educators to improve engineering design education
   • Develop a repository of design focused teaching material
   • Identify best practices for teaching and evaluation of design and related areas, such as critical thinking, decision making and  communication
   • Disseminate best practices via appropriate channels, such as CEEA
2. Facilitate knowledge transfer from research to practice
   • Identify current knowledge gaps
   • Provide a forum for discussing and synthesizing relevant research
3. Facilitate a Community of Practice for Engineering Design Educators to share and build upon past experiences
   • Identify areas of interest for current educators
   • Develop and communicate an understanding of the design education landscape in Canada
   • Facilitate collaboration between design educators on new educational initiatives
   • Promote the development of cross-departmental and cross-faculty of multidisciplinary student design projects, in recognition of the need for engineers to collaborate with and learn from engineers from other disciplines as well as non-engineers.

Mandate:

The mandate of the Design Education and Communication SIG is to foster the creation of a community of practice surrounding engineering design education in Canada. This will provide a setting for the discussion, evaluation and development of strategies, tools and methods for teaching engineering design and supporting students in learning engineering through design.. A particular focus will be the transfer of knowledge between educators in order to share best practices and identify common areas of interest for new directions in design education.