An Experiential Learning Approach for Enhancing Performance of First Year Engineering Students in Engineering Graphics Course

Engineering Drawing is a crucial and mandatory course for first-year engineering students. This subject plays a vital role in enhancing students' ability to visualize, imagine, and effectively illustrate concepts. It aids them in expressing their ideas clearly and swiftly, comprehending drawings produced by others, and devising effective designs. The curriculum covers essential topics like projection, sectioning, and the development of solids such as prism, pyramid, cylinder, cone, cube, and tetrahedron. These topics help students develop the ability to conceptualize, visualize, and create drawings according to specific requirements. The achievement of learning outcomes related to these subjects is hindered by the challenges faced by first-year engineering students, including their lack of fundamental knowledge in technical drawing and limited abilities in imagination and visualization. As a result, their performance in these areas tends to be subpar. To address this issue, a practical "learning by doing" approach is introduced alongside traditional classroom instruction. This strategy aims to boost the visualization, imagination, and technical drawing proficiency of first-year engineering students. This article outlines the author's endeavors to enhance students' visualization, imagination, and drawing skills. The focus is on involving students actively in both classroom and extracurricular learning. By methodically incorporating a "learning by doing" approach, there has been a notable enhancement in student engagement, achievement of course objectives, and overall performance in the course assessments. The topic of development of solids was completely taught with this method. This activity resulted increase in the CO attainment, active participation and engagement of the students in the class room as well as outside of the classroom. Following the implementation of this activity, there was a substantial rise of 17.30% in the accomplishment of course outcome, coupled with a notable increase of 25.34% in the students' learning index.