Best practices in teaching technical drawing: experiences of collaboration in three Italian Universities

This work present some best practice cases in teaching technical drawing done by three Italian Universities: Brescia, Udine, and Cassino and Southern Lazio. The intention to innovate and improve the basic technical drawing courses offered by these three Universities started in 2014. The objective of this collaboration was the development of some tools to help the students in understanding the fundamental concepts of technical drawing. The first tool developed, in order of time, was the Technical Drawing Evaluation Grid – TDEG. Starting from this tool, other learning aids were developed for the undergraduate engineering students. Some of them are: an online test for students’ self-assessment of technical drawing knowledge; a questionnaire to collect students’ opinions on different technical drawing and engineering design topics; a method for the improvement of students’ motivation to study; and a self-learning tool for teaching manufacturing dimensioning. The preliminary results of these different practices are presented and discussed in the following, posing the basis of the definition of some best practice methods that can be used for the improvement of the teaching and learning of technical drawing basic concepts for engineering students.