Teaching engineering graphics

The New York Times (Oct. 31) -- Engineering and art were not always completely separate disciplines. Take Leonardo da Vinci, who seamlessly combined the two. “Five hundred years ago, you couldn’t really tell the difference between artists and engineers,” says James Michael Leake, a senior lecturer in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering and director of engineering graphics at Illinois. Few schools actually require engineering students to take art, but Illinois comes close. Leake incorporates freehand sketching and computer-aided design in his engineering graphics class.