[rjsw]

I feel that mechanical engineers should have a bit of understanding about what is going on behind the scenes when they click on things in a CAD package.

From talking to recent students and current professors, I'm not sure they are learning this as part of a degree course.

[OJFord]

By 'behind the scenes' do you mean the physical objects that they're modelling, or how the software works?

[rjsw]

I mean the kind of data structures that the software is operating on, in particular the ones that can end up in an exported file.