Author(s)

Chunxing Gu ¹, Di Zhang ²

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
² School of Mechanical Electronic Technology, Shanghai Jianqiao University, Shanghai, China

Corresponding Author

Chunxing Gu

ABSTRACT

Course design marks the first independent design practice for undergraduate mechanical engineering students. However, the delivery of this task consistently falls short of its intended competency-building objectives: the decision-making and trade-off processes leave almost no traceable evidence for instructors to assess, and the professional values integrated into Chinese curricula under the framework of Curriculum Ideological and Political Education (CIPED) are confined to opening lectures or concluding report sections, with no demonstrable connection to actual design practice. This paper describes a reform that is task-bound, process-traceable and AI-interactive while leaving the assessment structure untouched. Each design dimension is bound to a named step of a nine-step protocol for the standard two-stage cylindrical-gear reducer project, so every judgment must appear as something that can be opened and checked: a line of the calculation sheet, an interactive 3D model, a passage of the report, or a field of the title or calculation block. Two AI roles work inside that workflow, and each leaves a trace. The AI tutor requires students to justify, in their own words, the candidate solutions they adopt or reject; the AI design agent renders the submitted model as an interactive view against which a named safety-relevant decision can be inspected. A diagnostic rubric, with a pre-registered multi-batch rule that can return "not established", turns the question of whether this formation reaches the design work into an inspection of deliverables already graded. The reducer is the main case, transmission-system designs the verification cases.

KEYWORDS

Artificial Intelligence, Task-Bound Design; Process Traceability; Engineering Education Accreditation; Curriculum Reform

CITE THIS PAPER

Chunxing Gu, Di Zhang. Task-Bound, Process-Traceable and AI-Interactive Teaching Reform for the Course Design of Mechanical Design. Advances in Educational Technology and Psychology (2026). Vol. 10, No. 4, 118-125. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/aetp.2026.100416.

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Sponsors, Associates, and Links

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• Curriculum and Teaching Methodology
  
  
• Transactions on Comparative Education
  
  
• Applied & Educational Psychology
  
  
• Advances in Vocational and Technical Education
  
  
• Adult and Higher Education