Intro to Engineering: A Curriculum Built for Your First-Year Course

If you teach a first-year engineering course, you know the challenge: you've got three or four weeks to give students a meaningful first taste of CAD, and building that unit from scratch eats up time you don't have. That's exactly the gap the new Intro to Engineering curriculum is built to fill.

This isn't a random collection of tutorials but a structured, modular course specifically designed for professors introducing CAD for the first time. It is built from lessons that have already been proven in classrooms and is packaged so you can easily incorporate it into your syllabus.

What Each Module Comes With

Every module is a complete package, not just a set of instructions to follow along with:

• Lecture slides: Ready-to-project decks that walk through the module's concepts.
• Teacher guides: Step-by-step teaching guides with learning objectives, standards alignment, key vocabulary, guiding questions, and prep tips, so you know exactly what to cover and what to have ready before class.
• Student instructions: Clear, media-rich, step-by-step lesson content students can follow at their own pace, whether you're teaching in person or remotely.
• Onshape starter documents: Pre-built Onshape documents for each lesson and project, so students open a document that's already set up and ready to work in, rather than starting from a blank screen.

Everything lives in Google Docs and Onshape documents, so it's easy to edit, link into your LMS, or hand off as-is.

What's in the Curriculum So Far

Module 1: Modeling Basics

Every student starts here. This module walks through the fundamentals of 3D modeling – sketching, features, and the core workflow of building a part from scratch. It's designed for students who've never opened a CAD tool before, so nobody's left behind on day one.

Module 2: Assemblies and a First Look at Simulation

Once students can model a part, Module 2 shows them how parts come together. Students learn how to build assemblies. Then, if you’re looking for a project idea of how engineers use CAD for design, there’s a short project that also works as a gentle introduction to simulation.

Rather than a full FEA deep dive, this project gives students a practical, low-stakes first exposure to structural analysis – enough to understand what simulation is for and why it matters, without requiring a semester of runway to get there.

(Coming Soon) Module 3: Drawing Creation

Rounding out the curriculum, a third module on the basics of drawing creation is currently in development. Releasing later this fall, it'll tie concept development to communicable engineering documentation; first modeling, then assembling, and finally, documenting the work the way engineers actually hand it off.

Why It's Built This Way

The curriculum is intentionally scoped to fit a 3- to 4-week window of two 50-minute class periods each week. This structure allows students to gain real CAD fluency without consuming their entire semester. And because it lives in the Onshape Learning Center, there's nothing to install: students just log in and go.

Get Started

You can find the full curriculum, ready to use, on the Onshape Learning Center. New modules will keep landing as they're finished, so it's worth bookmarking as the drawing module rolls out.

To use this curriculum, you’ll need to own your own copies of the curriculum documents. We made everything read-only so you can look at it, but if you want to use it directly or even make changes, just copy and edit as you need.

• Make a copy of each Onshape document
  • Do this to own your own copy of the curriculum documents. From there, use as starter documents within Classes and Assignments or share directly with your LMS
• Make a copy of each Google doc you want for yourself
  • Do this to edit and make each Google document you choose. Now you can make it your own!
• Print/Save Google Docs as a PDF (optional, but might be nice for you)
  • Do this if you want to easily embed the content in an LMS or upload to any additional Onshape documents you create

If you have questions about the curriculum or want to share feedback, reach out to mailto:curriculum-support@ptc.com.