E/sup 4/-genesis of a new curriculum

In 1988, Drexel University began a five year experimental project designated E/sup 4/, to develop and implement new strategies to enhance its undergraduate engineering curriculum. This program, entitled "An Enhanced Educational Experience for Engineering Students", involved a major paradigm shift in which the environment and all activities focus on the students as emerging professional engineers with the faculty serving as their mentors from the very beginning of the educational process. The new strategy was designed to provide the student an immediate exposure to those things which the faculty believed to be essential to successful practice in the 21st century. The author describes the project and the results.