To encourage engineering programs to respond to the concern of industries many accreditation boards all over the world for engineering course have recommended criteria for the accreditation of engineering course. These criteria give valuable suggestions about forming curriculum and courses. One needs to plan instruction strategy so that these criteria are met.
Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) introduced the Engineering Criteria 2000 (EC2000) to evaluate Engineering Programs in the USA. ABET specifies eleven sub-criteria 3a – 3k under criterion 3, as below.

3a An ability to apply knowledge of mathematics, science, and engineering
3b An ability to design and conduct experiments, as well as to analyze and interpret data.
3c An ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs
3d An ability to function on multi-disciplinary teams
3e An ability to identify, formulate, and solve engineering problems
3f An understanding of professional and ethical responsibility
3g An ability to communicate effectively
3h The broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context
3i A recognition of the need for, and an ability to engage in life-long learning
3j A knowledge of contemporary issues
3k An ability to use the techniques, skills, and modern engineering tools necessary for engineering practice.

Engineering and Science

In the perception of many, modern engineering is seen as taking over its knowledge from scientists and, by some occasionally dramatic probably intellectually uninteresting process, using this knowledge to fashion material artifacts. From this standpoint of view, studying the epistemology of science should automatically subsume the knowledge content of engineering. In view of several historians, technology and engineering appear not as derivatives from science, but autonomous bodies of knowledge, identifiably different from the scientific knowledge with which they interact. Engineering has its own significant component of thought, though different in its specifics, resembles scientific thought in being creative and constructive; it is not simply routine and deductive as assumed in the applied-science model. In this view, engineering, though it may apply science, is not the same as or entirely applied science. Design, one of the core activities of engineering, involves tentative layout of the arrangement and dimensions of the artifice, checking of the candidate device by mathematical analysis or experimental test to see if it does not. Such procedure usually requires several iterations before finally dimensioned plans can be released for production. Numerous difficult tradeoffs may be required, calling for decisions on the basis of incomplete or uncertain knowledge. W. G. Vincenti identified six categories of engineering knowledge, as given in previous post, after exploring several historical cases of engineering activities.

Categories of Engineering Knowledge

W. G. Vincenti has categorized types of engineering knowledge and the way this types of knowledge is developed. The categories of engineering knowledge are as-
1. Fundamental design concepts: operational principles of the devices.
2. Criteria and Specifications: It is necessary to translate the qualitative goals for the device into specific, quantitative goals. Design criteria vary widely in perceptibility.
3. Theoretical tools: Mathematical tools, physical principles, and theories based on scientific principles but motivated by and limited to a technologically important class of phenomena or even to a specific device.
4. Quantitative data: Descriptive (physical constants) and prescriptive (how things should be) data.
5. Practical considerations: an array of less sharply defined considerations derived from experience in practice, considerations that frequently do not lend themselves to theorizing, tabulation, or programming into a computer.
6. Design instrumentalities: These refer to the procedural knowledge. Include the procedures, way of thinking and judgmental skills by which it is done.

Ref: Vincenti W. G., "What Engineers Know and How They Know It, Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History", Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, Year - 1990