A bold, new, integrated, first-year engineering curriculum is being developed. Students are being prepared by a curriculm which both develops relationships among concepts and demands that students develop effective problem-solving methods. By relating the many topics in a first-year curriculum through broad, unifying concepts, students are building clear, effective mental pictures of the physical world. Powerful workstations strengthen students' abilities to apply physical laws by minimizing manual data and symbolic manipulation. Students' abilities to analyze and synthesize are nurtured by applying widely applicable search heuristics throughout the curriculum. The new curriculum has three goals: 1) infuse broad concepts, 2) improve techniques, and 3) cultivate effective and efficient search heuristics. The grantee is providing funds for this project that are greater than the award.
