Abstract
One of the main objectives of drafting education in mechanical engineering is to train the students such that they can easily understand the spatial relationship of a solid object expressed by three orthographic views and conversely they can draw,without difficulty,the three orthographic views of a given solid. In order to attain this objective we have developed the next three software systems, i.e.,(1) a drafting system for three orthographic views,(2) an automatic solid reconstruction system from three orthographic views, and (3) an automatic generation system of development drawings from a solid model representation.For the last few years we have put these systems into the uses of drafting class and we found them very successful. This article reports an outline of the trial uses of these systems in real drafting education class.In chapter 1 we discuss how the drafting education should be in mechanical engineering department. We point out the necessity of training of dealing with spatial objects and propose to utilize 3 dimensional computer aided design system to fulfill this requirement. In chapter 2 we briefly explain the computer aided design systems which have been put into practical use. In chapter 3 we explain how we introduced these systems into drafting class. In chapter 4 we show the results of feedback from our students on this new trials.
