By Jason Prout

With education funding being cut in more areas than we can count, we have a choice to make. We can treat our current economic state as a storm to be weathered or as an opportunity to trim the fat in our individual curricula. Traditional drafting equipment supply and maintenance is one of the most expensive areas of any drafting department?s budget. If we could only realize that all that expense is just an unrealized personal crutch.

Drafting and CAD (computer-aided design or computer-aided drafting) teachers have been struggling with the "compass crutch" for more than 15 years. The compass crutch is the idea that since drafting teachers learned drafting theory on the board, it?s only logical to teach it on the board. The common reason given is that teachers need a way to teach drafting and design theory so that their students will successfully absorb it. And since computer tutorials try, but never seem to work well enough to replace hands-on learning, the result for most of us has been table and instrument drawing.

This sounds like a good enough excuse for many of us to teach with instruments, but it?s just that?an excuse. Teaching drafting theory on the board is an unnecessary expense that teaches theory while giving our students a skill that is about as useful as eight-track player repair. We need to realize that instrument drawing is not just dying in industry?it?s DEAD. The last big holdout for the tables was expected to be the architects, but they are not just starting to convert to computer, they already have.

Here is an excerpt from a discussion at "Trends," a conference of Michigan community college teachers held in Traverse City, Michigan, last fall.

During the CADD (computer-aided drafting and design) roundtable discussion, the moderator posed the question: "With Autocad steadily losing market share, are we teaching the correct software?"

This met with some mumblings about solid modelers, but no strong feedback until an instructor made a statement that stopped the discussion short. The statement was: "The question is not which software we should be teaching, but how many."

This led to some instructors discussing different fundamental levels of CAD programs, but there was also a noticeable absence of discussion from several instructors who realized something else. That was, in order to be an effective CAD teacher today, you need to be trained in multiple software packages yourself and be able to adapt with the changes in the marketplace. This had the added meaning that it is especially important that everything we teach our students needs to be useful, or it?s just a waste of valuable time. So, how can we teach theory in a way that is a continuing and positive benefit to our students?

The more useful skills and experiences we expose our students to, the better equipped they will be to handle the quick-change style of the industrial world. The more software packages your students have in their mental "toolboxes," the better they will be prepared for truly successful careers in industry. This can start right at the beginning. So, what is the answer to the compass crutch? The answer is sketching.

Sketching is the technique that many of us breeze through while talking about drawing layout during the first couple of weeks of the year. Sketching is software that needs only pencil and paper. You don?t need an oversized table, gobs of expensive instruments or even a computer with costly programming. Sketching can be used anywhere that the student (future designer) has access to a pencil and any piece of paper. Sketching can be used to teach all the areas of drafting theory, and it has the bonus of being a skill that your students will be able to use after they graduate. It also has the benefit of requiring extremely few resources to teach and learn.

Consider this example:

You are the owner of a manufacturing company and you?re sitting across from two identical competing engineering houses. You verbally describe your rather unusual idea to both of them in an attempt to find out which one can help you to make this new product. The first company?s representative says, "I will get someone working on it right away." But the second company?s representative hands you a rough, but accurate, sketch of the idea you just explained with the question, "Is this what you are trying to make?" You need to decide which company to work with. At this point, which company gives the appearance of understanding your product better?

A strong ability to sketch can help your students become better communicators in the industrial workplace. Sketching has the added advantage of improving communication between industrial departments. It also boosts an individual?s self-confidence through the knowledge that his or her ideas are being readily understood.

Now don?t throw away all of that perfectly good hardware; most texts that help to teach sketching (engineering graphics) also recognize that there are a few things that are best taught with the help of a good old compass. These are most specifically geometric constructions and descriptive geometry. Then again, with a little luck, you may be able to get your geometry teacher to include these topics.


Jason Prout is a computer aided drafting and design technologies instructor at Kirtland Community College in Roscommon, Michigan. He can be reached at proutj@kirtland.edu, or by mail at Kirtland Community College, 10775 N. St. Helen Rd., Roscommon, MI 48653.


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