2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Today, the infrastructure challenges civil engineers face are complicated not only by accelerating technological progress, rapidly evolving societal needs and expectations, and complex global environmental challenges, but also by swiftly changing demographics. Changing demographics require inclusive perspectives both in the formulation of engineering solutions and the recruitment and training of an increasingly diverse pool of aspiring engineers. The development of diverse civil engineers, as stewards of technology, the natural and built environments, and public health, who are as well versed in professional skills as they are in technical skills is the challenge we face as engineering educators.
This paper describes a new civil engineering curriculum designed to meet this challenge. Our new curriculum, that was the result of a multi-year effort, is centered around a “design spine”. The design spine, series of eight courses, will improve the development of professional skills, improve fluency with data analysis and computing skills, improve critical thinking skills, and integrate systems thinking through project-based learning. The design spine helps connect and integrate the separate subdiscipline courses typical of most civil engineering curricula as a system of systems.
The courses in the design spine were developed using feedback and input from faculty, students, alumni, and employers as well as considering ASCE’s Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge, 3rd Edition, ABET criteria, and our College of Engineering’s Complete Engineering competencies. All of this was done while reducing the credit hours for the degree from 130 to 126. We began offering the new design spine courses in fall 2022. This paper describes our path to the new curriculum as well as describing it, and our plan for assessing the new curriculum to ensure that it is working as planned.