Hi Cary!
You're absolutely right, and most of the universities who do teach drawing in engineering courses only teach 2D views (like an engineering drawing for manufacturing) and if they do teach and 3D views it is almost strictly orthographic or maybe oblique.

In the mechanical engineering course where we teach perspective views, we also teach orthographic and oblique and teach the students which view is appropriate for each situation. For conveying dimensions and other manufacturing concerns, orthographic and oblique views are preferred, but in this course, we are also introducing students to product-generation techniques and it has been shown that being able to generate effective drawings helps in this process. 

Also, we have shown that teaching this method significantly improves sketching ability over teaching orthographic sketching alone and our preliminary data has shown that students taught perspective are more confident in their sketching ability and more likely to use it in the future.

Hey Deborah!

Yes! The more we present this project, the more feedback we hear about how this could be used in so many different fields. While our initial focus was on teaching engineers to sketch, the program itself is not exclusive in any way. It uses a proven mastery-based pedagogy to help the user to master the basics and the graduate on to more complicated tasks all while returning immediate feedback to encourage improvement. This method is useful to anyone who would like to learn to sketch in perspective. 

Moving forward, we definitely plan to continue using the program to teach student in engineering and industrial design, but we are also hoping we can start to implement the program in high school art classes or to anyone interested in bettering their sketching ability. 

Yes, excellent question!
The benefit of learning sketching has been one of the things we have really tried to impart on the students. Overall, it's been a mixed bag. Some of the students see the benefit and thoroughly enjoy learning the skill while others are still requesting "less sketching, more CAD".

There is definitely some progress to be made here, but there is still some positive feedback from the students as well.

Thanks for the suggestion Robert!

While we have been focused on the perspective view for Sketchtivity, we have recently started to implement other views and including exercises in creating sketches for something specific like a PPA is an excellent idea.

Sure thing!

We have structured our study as a pre-and-post study and testing three groups. The "Traditional" group consists of students who learn traditional engineering drawing, the "Perspective" group who learn the industrial design-based sketching curriculum, and the "Sketchtivity" group who are a subset of the Perspective group that use the Sketchtivity program in place of some homework assignments. All students complete a spatial visualization quiz pre-and post-course to see the impacts of the group they are in. Spatial Visualization skills are one of the big benefits of sketching and have been linked to creativity and idea generation. We have also had the students complete design-self efficacy surveys and a paper sketching quiz.

So far we have seen that all three of these groups are not significantly different in either Spatial Visualization skills or in Self-Efficacy. Preliminary studies have also found that sketching ability was significantly increased in the Perspective group when compared to the Traditional group.

Essentially, We have included an extra skill for the students while maintaining the other crucial skills like spatial visualization.

Sorry to plug our own work here, but the following paper explains the experiment pretty well:

Hilton, E., Li, W., Newton, S. H., Alemdar, M., Pucha, R., & Linsey, J. (2016, August). The Development and Effects of Teaching Perspective Free-Hand Sketching in Engineering Design. In ASME 2016 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (pp. V003T04A013-V003T04A013). American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Hopefully in the next couple of years! We are currently focused on researching the benefits of this kind of program so that we can create it to be as effective as possible, but hope to eventually focus on commercialization.