Engineering education

Nature is a starting point to analyse and to conceive solutions for complex systems, and a reservoir of inspiration to provide innovative answers to the product development as well as to the interaction between man and nature: this is the first key idea that the authors would like to transmit to the new generations of engineers and designers. Furthermore, it is also important to embed the development of technology within a sustainable development frame-work: from this point of view the authors are encouraging students to develop a particular case-study.

Keywords: Bionics , Design education , Theory of technical systems , TRIZ

The paper deals with the developing of a virtual training system to be implemented in an aeronautic company. The strength of the training method based on the use of Virtual Reality is the high degree of interactivity that it is possible to obtain in a virtual environment. In fact, unlike the traditional methods based on classroom lessons supported by slides and videos that only allow a passive participation of the users to the training, Virtual Reality, with its immersive environments, allows the students both to visualize realistically the contents of the lesson, and to interact with the represented objects. According to that, thanks to the collaboration with Alenia, one of the most important Italian companies in the aeronautical field, we elaborated an innovative virtual training methodology, named AVIRA, specifically dedicated to the users working with composed materials. For the development of this system we started from a real case regarding a particular production process of a specific component. The considered production process is the stratification/lamination of carboresin, used for the fabrication of aeronautical components of high technological content, that is currently active at Alenia Aeronautica in Foggia. © The Eurographics Association 2007.

Achieving a strict correlation between academic and industrial world is an important development direction in the engineering education field. The authors' first step along this path was the activation of several courses on methodical design, and the second step was the activation of a tight cooperation with industries, so that students could develop their thesis facing up to real problems. The fundamental advantages of this approach are: a) accustom the students to follow a design method; b) increase students' ability to find out and to consider "all" the possible solutions for a given problem, with the scope to choose the "best" one; c) increase students' ability to evaluate solutions' behaviour; d) possibility for the students to follow the production of the designed or modified machine. From the educational point of view, the two important aspects of this particular work are: a) The cooperation with the industrial world: the design was developed in cooperation with a company specialized in die-cutter machine production. The company realised and now produces a new machine based on this work. b) The application and integration of several design methods.

Keywords: Design education , Design methods , Die-cutting machine

While relational simulation games have been widely used for learning activities in areas such as business, management and communication, their development in the engineering field is still very limited. In this paper a web-based simulation game was designed in order to fill this existing gap in the development of relational simulation games related to engineering aspects and in particular to the design process of complex systems. An evaluation of a first web trial competition, carried out by questionnaires, shows a satisfactory achievement of the proposed learning tool objectives. © 2006 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Keywords: complex systems , engineering-design education , learning tools , simulation , web-based games

The overall aim of this paper is to present a web-based system to simulate the process of aircraft design in a competitive environment. The main purpose is to provide a tool to introduce design and simulation problems in engineering-design education. The structure of the system is a game where a group of teams carry out the design of an aircraft trying to optimize product performances and minimizing product and development costs. The web-based framework is a three-tier system developed in a pure Java platform using the JavaServer Faces technology for the presentation layer and Hiber-nate/HSQL for the persistence layer.

Keywords: Competitive environments , Engineering education , Lean simulation , Product design , Web-based simulation

In this work a web-based tool to simulate a competitive design environment is described. The speci c application, in particular, has been implemented to simulate a competitive tender for the design of a military aircraft. The teams which participate to the game are asked to design an aircraft which has to satisfy given speci cation. The tender is won by the team which gain the higher score, as detailed by the game rules. The proposed application can be used as an active teaching tool where students can be stimulated to develop their relational and practical capabilities. In particular the scholars can be encouraged to adopt the design techniques that can be applied to the management of complex models that cannot be represented through an explicit mathematical description.

This paper deals with a semester-long educational experience the authors led at the University of Calabria for reproducing current developments and uncertainties in real-world concurrent engineering, knowledge management practice and virtual enterprise organization. Students with different backgrounds (mechanical engineering, computer science engineering and management engineering) were selected in order to form a laboratory class and then were divided into many multidisciplinary teams. Such teams played different roles and were required to collaborate on the Web to simulate a virtual enterprise, which was aimed at designing virtual prototypes of average complexity articles. In addition to that, any team was involved in the construction of a knowledge base for codifying the explicit knowledge arising from the execution of technical and managerial tasks. The paper deals with models, methodologies and technologies that have been used in this laboratory experience and, moreover, it describes an approach for simulating, in an educational environment, some aspects of the behaviour of virtual enterprises generated by a virtual organization.

This paper deals with a semester-long educational experience the authors led at the University of Calabria for reproducing current developments and uncertainties in real-world concurrent engineering, knowledge management practice and virtual enterprise organization. Students with different backgrounds (mechanical engineering, computer science engineering and management engineering) were selected in order to form a laboratory class and then were divided into many multidisciplinary teams. Such teams played different roles and were required to collaborate on the Web to simulate a virtual enterprise, which was aimed at designing virtual prototypes of average complexity articles. In addition to that, any team was involved in the construction of a knowledge base for codifying the explicit knowledge arising from the execution of technical and managerial tasks. The paper deals with models, methodologies and technologies that have been used in this laboratory experience and, moreover, it describes an approach for simulating, in an educational environment, some aspects of the behaviour of virtual enterprises generated by a virtual organization. © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

User interfaces of current 3D and virtual reality environments require highly interactive input/output (I/O) techniques and appropriate input devices, providing users with natural and intuitive ways of interacting. This paper presents an interaction model, some techniques, and some ways of using novel input devices for 3D user interfaces. The interaction model is based on a tool-object syntax, where the interaction structure syntactically simulates an action sequence typical of a human's everyday life: One picks up a tool and then uses it on an object. Instead of using a conventional mouse, actions are input through two novel input devices, a hand- and a force-input device. The devices can be used simultaneously or in sequence, and the information they convey can be processed in a combined or in an independent way by the system. The use of a hand-input device allows the recognition of static poses and dynamic gestures performed by a user's hand. Hand gestures are used for selecting, or acting as, tools and for manipulating graphical objects. A system for teaching and recognizing dynamic gestures, and for providing graphical feedback for them, is described. © 1994, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.