Because of the escalating pace of information interchange, continuous corporate restructuring, and global competition, the new engineering graduate must not only be well founded in the fundamentals of engineering science, but also must be able to contribute immediately to product design and development. Many engineering curricula now include capstone design courses, as well as some design content spread throughout the elective portion of the curriculum. Here, the authors describe how the National Science Foundation (USA) has funded a multi-year project involving five universities and four engineering disciplines "to demonstrate how design activity, fully integrated with economic principles, can be effectively utilized to teach the engineering science component of the undergraduate curricula".
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Callen et al. (2002) studied this question.