Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION, cilt.25, sa.1, ss.112-121, 2009 (SCI-Expanded)
This paper gives an assessment of the transition from the mechanical engineering curriculum to the mechatronics engineering curriculum in Turkey. It looks at the requirements for the transition and analyses the approaches adopted by Turkish universities. To achieve this, the study provides a review of the mechanical engineering departments and the proportion of mechatronics courses tonight within these departments. As presented in the paper, some universities prefer a separate department for mechatronics engineering; others introduce optional courses, while the rest replace some core modules with mechatronics engineering type courses. Therefore, this work classifies the universities into three groups. In addition to Turkish universities, some selected cases of universities from Asia, the USA, Canada, and Europe are also included as examples of each identified approach, thereby providing the necessary background for comparison. The comparative study reveals that there does lot seem to be a definitive approach to updating a mechanical engineering curriculum or a mechatronics engineering curriculum with any clearly do lined structure. Nevertheless, the proportions of mechatronics courses in mechanical engineering curricula in Turkish universities indicate that the required measures seem to have been taken in most of the cases. In this study an attempt was also made to identify the problems that Turkish universities are facing in mechanical engineering education and some suggestions were made to overcome these difficulties to improve the quality of such education in Turkey. The paper concludes with a general suggestion that consists of a set of solution models that may allow a smooth transition from a mechanical engineering to mechatronics engineering curriculum.