A theme-based spiral curriculum approach is being adopted to initiate the department-level reform (DLR) of the freshman engineering and the bioprocess engineering curricula at Virginia Tech. A large number of engineering faculty members are collaborating with experts in educational psychology and academic assessment to accomplish the objectives of this 3-year NSF supported project that began in September 2004. Successful implementation of the spiral approach will be used as a model for incorporating similar reforms in other engineering departments and elsewhere.

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assistant department head of the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, has interests in better understanding and improving the instruction of engineering design as well as increasing diversity of the engineering population.

Primarily as a result of the move of Computer Science into the College of Engineering, the first-semester engineering course taken by all first-year engineering students at Virginia Tech was significantly redesigned. The primary goal of the redesign was to switch from an inherently procedural programming language (Matlab) to an object-oriented language (Alice). This object-oriented approach to learning programming was also believed to be better for students bound for computer science and computer engineering. In addition, coverage of ethics, which had been constrained to engineering topics, will be broadened to include software issues. Previously implemented hands-on early design portions of the course will not be significantly modified. The first offering of the new course will be in Fall Semester 2004, with approximately 1,200 students enrolled.

This paper reviews the success and failures of the Green Engineering Program at Virginia Tech over the past ten years. The history of the program is examined, including the steps to offering a ‘concentration’ in the area. Both of the core courses of the eighteen credit concentration are described and their evolution tracked: Introduction to Green Engineering (ENGR3124) and Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (ENGR3134). Steps currently being considered to add graduate level courses and efforts to obtain research funding are discussed.