The Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate (CDIO) engineering educational strategy has been adopted by a number of universities in the USA, Europe, Canada, South Africa, Asia and the South Pacific. These universities are using CDIO as the framework for undergraduate engineering curricular planning and outcomes-based assessment. The CDIO Initiative’s goal is to educate future engineers in the fundamentals of engineering skills within a context of conceiving, designing, implementing and operating products and systems. The Department of Aerospace Engineering at the United States Naval Academy joined the CDIO Initiative in July 2003. The Naval Academy already emphasized many of the skills in the CDIO Syllabus, such as ethics, leadership, teamwork, systems thinking, and communications that are part of design-build projects, integral components of a CDIO program. What was lacking was the overall framework for developing a curriculum consistent with our goals and one that could be used to guide outcomes assessment. The CDIO Initiative provides us with the overall framework and assessment tools necessary for the successful development and continuous improvement of our program. The Aerospace Engineering program at the United States Naval Academy has used assessment to guide its evolution from initiation to institutionalization. At the program level evaluation we used our CDIO Compliance results and the CDIO Implementation Model as bases for the ABET Program Self-Study Report. At the time of our out ABET visit in 2005, our self assessment of progress towards full implementation of the CDIO odel was 36 out of 48, an increase from our score of 13 in 2003. Our programs strengths were Standards 1, 2, 4, 5, and 9 and our weaknesses were Standards 3, 8, 10, 11, and 12.
2nd International CDIO Conference, Linkoping University, Linkoping, Sweden, 13 to 14 June 2006