Overview

This unit aims to introduce students to the profession of engineering and covers foundational professional skills including design, communication (written, oral, visual and technical), teamwork, sustainability, ethics and creativity and innovation. This unit will help students clarify an engineering career path and will build their skillset towards being an innovative engineer with skills in both open-ended problems and solution focused outcomes.By participation in a global humanitarian engineering design project with a community partner organisation, students will be introduced to the role engineers can take in creating positive impact on people’s lives and the wellbeing of wider communities. Students work on developing design concepts that achieve social, economic and/or environmental outcomes.

Teaching Periods
Location
Start and end dates
Last self-enrolment date
Census date
Last withdraw without fail date
Results released date
Semester 1
Location
Hawthorn
Start and end dates
26-February-2024
26-May-2024
Last self-enrolment date
10-March-2024
Census date
31-March-2024
Last withdraw without fail date
12-April-2024
Results released date
02-July-2024

Learning outcomes

Students who successfully complete this unit will be able to:

  • Discuss professional engineering careers and emerging trends in Engineering and appraise the ethical aspects of engineering projects (K1, K4, K6, A1 A2)
  • Identify, locate, and select appropriate sources of data and interpret and use these to describe the issues facing a given community (K1, K4, K5, S1, S2, S4, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6)
  • Identify, discuss, and generate solutions to humanitarian engineering design problems using sustainability solutions and prioritise these solutions in terms of social, economic and environmental factors and their technical merits and/or viability (K1, K2, K3, K4, K6, S1, S2, S3, A3, A4, A6)
  • Plan and design a solution to an engineering design problem, assess alternative design strategies in terms of economic, social and environmental factors and justify your design in terms of these factors and standard engineering principles and practices (K2, K3, K5, S1, S2, S3, S4, A1, A2, A3, A4, A6)
  • Appraise and assess the quality of your colleagues’ project work and reflect upon your own experiences within the unit and how these relate to your future employment and professional purpose (A4, A5, A6,A7)
  • Use and improve your negotiation, professional communication, presentation, planning, design, management, research and analysis skills (S2, S4, A2, A5, A6,A7)
  • Demonstrate effective communication through a professional presentation and engineering report writing and generate professional engineering drawings for engineering objects and design problems (K2, K3, A2, A5, A6, S1).

Teaching methods

Hawthorn

Type Hours per week Number of weeks Total (number of hours)
Live Online
Lecture
2.00 12 weeks 24
On-campus
Class
3.00 12 weeks 36
On-campus
Class
2.00 12 weeks 24
Unspecified Activities
Independent Learning
5.50 12 weeks 66
TOTAL150

Assessment

Type Task Weighting ULO's
AssignmentIndividual 10 - 20% 1,4,5,6,7 
Drawing PortfolioIndividual 10 - 30% 3,4,5,6,7 
Online TestsIndividual 10 - 30% 3,4,5,6,7 
PortfolioIndividual 10 - 30% 3,4,5,6,7 
ProjectIndividual/Group 20 - 40% 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 

Content

 

 

  • Introduction to engineering as a profession including major sub-disciplines of engineering and professional purpose
  • Introduction to sustainable and humanitarian engineering
  • Introduction to design processes, design thinking, creativity and visualisation skills development to conceptually understand ill-defined problems
  • Introduction to engineering technical communication standard and Engineering drawing 
  • Humanitarian engineering design project, learning to solve real-world engineering problems in challenging environments
  • Developing professional communication skills

 

Study resources

Reading materials

A list of reading materials and/or required textbooks will be available in the Unit Outline on Canvas.