TECHNICAL DRAWING


Technical drawing emerges as a means of expression and communication essential for both the research process development on shapes and the graphical understanding of sketches and technological and artistic projects whose ultimate goal is the creation of products that can have a utilitarian or artistic value or both at once. The subject promotes the ability of abstraction for understanding many paths and conventions, making it a general valuable training aid. Among its aims stands out specifically to provide students with the skills needed to communicate graphically with objectivity in an increasingly complex world that requires the design and manufacture of products that meet present and future needs. This communicative function, thanks to the agreement of a number of conventions at national, Community and international level, allows us to transmit, interpret and understand ideas or projects in a reliable, objective and unambiguous way. Its domain is international and it tends to universality.

 

Technical Drawing, therefore, is essential as a means of communication in any investigative process or project that uses visual aspects, ideas and ways to visualize what is being designed and to define clearly and exactly what you want to design, create or produce, that’s to say, the knowledge of Technical Drawing as a universal language in its two levels of communication: understand or interpret the encoded information, and express or develop understandable information for recipients. Thus, to make possible the knowledge of the world around us, it is necessary that students acquire specific skills in interpreting graphic documentation prepared in accordance with standard conventional representation systems. In addition to the knowledge of the major drawing standards, it requires an advanced development of its "spatial vision", understood as the capacity for abstraction, for example, visualize or imagine three-dimensional objects represented by flat images. Apart from understanding the complex graphic information around us, it is necessary that students handle the representation of spaces or objects of all kinds and the preparation of standard technical documents to set forth their ideas and projects which are related to the graphic design, with the architectural ideation or craft or manufacture of parts and assemblies.

 

This subject contributes to develop, transversely, skills such as creativity, initiative, teamwork, self-confidence and critical thinking, promoting behaviours favourable to the relationship, cooperation, solidarity, non-discrimination and participation; helping to promote effective planning practices, effort and rigor at work, esteem and respect for its own production and others.

 

The material is organized in two courses. During the first course they work on the content related to technical drawing as a language of communication and basic tool for understanding, analysis and representation of reality. To this end, students are gradually introduced to three main areas of interrelated content: Geometry, Representation Systems and Standards. Thus, students have an overview of the fundamentals of technical drawing that allow them to deepen next year’s content and applications. During the second year, in addition to continuing to work the contents of the blocks already initiated the first year, especially those related to solving complex geometric problems and the use of characteristic procedures of the dihedral system, a block of new content is introduced called graphic documentation project for the integration of the contents acquired in A-levels.

 

In the first block, called Geometry and Technical Drawing, during the two courses that make up this stage, students learn about the needed contents to solve configuration problems related to forms, while they analyse their presence in nature and art along history, and its applications in the scientific and technical world.

 

Similarly, the second block of content is dedicated to systems of representation that develop the fundamentals, characteristics and applications of the axonometrics, conical perspectives, and dihedral systems and dimension drawings. This block must be addressed in an integrated manner to allow discover relationships between systems and the advantages and disadvantages of each. In addition, it should promote the use of drawing "freehand" or Sketching as a tool for communicating ideas and analysis of representation problems.

 

The third block of content aims to provide students with the procedures to simplify, unify and objectify graphical representations. This block is especially related to the process of project development, object of the last block of content, so that although the established sequence places this block specifically in the first year, its conditions as a universal language makes it quite useful in the two years of A-levels. The third block of content, in the second course, called Projects, enables students to mobilize and interrelate the contents acquired throughout the stage, and use them to prepare and submit individually and collectively sketches, sketches and plans necessary to define a simple project related to the graphic, industrial and architectural design.

 

 

Finally, note the increasingly dominant role of new technologies, especially programs using computer-aided design, vector tools for graphic editing applications or interactive geometry. Their inclusion in the curriculum, not as content itself but as a tool, must empower students to learn the possibilities of these applications, assess the accuracy, speed and cleanliness they provide, serve as a stimulus in their training and allow the acquisition a more complete and integrated vision into the reality of Technical Drawing.