Descriptive Geometry Today: Problems and Prospects

Against the background of constant reduction of the time allocated for contact work with students in curricula, there are discussions on the necessity of teaching some disciplines in universities, and their list is constantly changing. In the current case, the current round of discussion is connected with the signing of the decree on the reform by the President of Russia V.V. Putin. Putin signed a decree on the reform of higher education. Now it is a pilot project, which will be tested in several universities for three years. It is about the transition of engineering training from bachelor's degree to specialization. The reform will require considerable efforts to develop new curricula, adjust the list of academic disciplines included in them. Simultaneously with the inclusion of modern disciplines into this list, the process of excluding obsolete and irrelevant disciplines is underway. According to the experience of the past years, disciplines of the general engineering cycle are constantly subjected to "reforms". In the case of technical specialties, descriptive geometry is a permanent outsider [8, 28]. The developers of the Federal State Educational Standards of Higher Education (FSES HE), who announced a competency-based approach to the learning process and assessment of knowledge of university graduates, probably also hold the opinion that descriptive geometry is a "dying" discipline. The purpose of the authors of the article is an attempt to look at the problem not from the point of view of the age of descriptive geometry, but only guided by the frequency and efficiency of its methods in engineering practice and modeling of geometric objects of spaces of dimension 2+ and more. The set goal required the solution of several problems. One of them is to clarify the question of what exactly the reformers are trying to do. Is it to remove an academic discipline or a section of mathematics, which is, in fact, descriptive geometry, from the course of engineers' training? It is also necessary to find out for which specialties or directions the descriptive geometry course is superfluous or obsolete.