Adopting additive manufacturing (AM) in product design is a challenge for organizations due to a shortage of skilled designers who can effectively use AM to address emerging engineering problems. The development of institutional talent in AM and design for AM (DfAM) is crucial for organizations looking to leverage AM capabilities. Therefore, designers need meaningful active experiences that highlight the advantages and limitations of AM technologies to enable informed artifact generation during the design process. However, limited access to active in-person learning experiences with industrial AM systems and knowledge to support the design of AM artifacts is a major hurdle to AM talent development. Digital modalities of AM education, such as computer-aided (CAx) and virtual reality (VR) tools, can therefore increase access to experiential learning to cultivate DfAM intuition. There is a gap in the literature, however, that investigates and compares immersive and non-immersive modalities in AM and studies their effectiveness in training and artifact generation. Additionally, there is a scarcity of information on the design process behind creating immersive experiences that can support these research endeavors. It is essential to investigate design guidelines and heuristics for creating immersive experiences that are meaningful and effective for AM and DfAM training. This research is thus motivated to explore the design and application of immersive and non-immersive digital modalities in AM and DfAM. The presented work here investigates the design of immersive VR user experiences for this purpose with support from the literature and findings in previously published work.
This opinion paper examines the impact of outdoor classrooms in environmental education in Nigeria. With the increasing concern about the environment and the need for effective educational approaches, outdoor classrooms have gained popularity as a promising tool for engaging students in hands-on, immersive learning experiences. This paper assesses the advantages and challenges associated with outdoor classrooms and investigates their effectiveness in promoting environmental awareness and stewardship among students. Drawing on empirical studies and expert opinions, it argues that outdoor classrooms provide unique opportunities for students to connect with nature, enhance their understanding of ecological concepts, and develop a sense of responsibility towards the environment. Furthermore, this paper explores the potential barriers to implementing outdoor classrooms, such as logistical constraints and limited resources, and proposes strategies to overcome them. By critically examining the impact and potential of outdoor classrooms in environmental education, this paper aims to promote the adoption and integration of this innovative approach into mainstream educational practices, ultimately fostering a society of environmentally conscious individuals.
Product teardowns or related activities may help novice engineers develop an understanding of systems and products. These activities allow for novices to directly explore physical components and the connections between those components in a given product, which are both aspects of robust systems thinking. In this study, students’ mental models of common products are examined before and after a product teardown activity using a previously published mental model elicitation method. Participants completed the product teardown activity in groups, identifying components, functionality, and opportunities for design improvement. Results suggest that a product teardown activity improves mental model representations of the same given product. However, the results also show that a product teardown activity has no impact on mental model representations of other closely related products. This suggests that product teardowns do not necessarily foster knowledge transfer as expected. Examples of a student’s mental model representations before and after the product teardown activity are provided. This study sets the foundation for future research on the relationships between systems thinking, mental models, engineering expertise, and other educational interventions within the context of engineering education. In future work, the results of this study may be compared with an identical study with 4th-year undergraduate students to investigate the role of expertise on knowledge transfer and its relationship to the development of robust systems thinking skills.
The increasing student enrollment in engineering and the growing importance of written communication motivate us to implement automated evaluation of written technical documents. This study aims to enhance our understanding of the automatic grading of written assignments in engineering and provides insights into effectively evaluating technical communication. We collected a graded dataset from a mechanical engineering course and manually selected features based on its grading rubric. Manually selected features include both task-independent features and task-dependent features. We evaluated the performance of the selected features on a classification model using grades provided by human graders. The combination of task-independent features and rubric-guided topic features outperformed any other single features or their combinations and reached a moderate agreement with human graders on 3 out of 5 datasets. The results suggest a new way to evaluate students’ assignments based on pre-defined rubrics and provide a significant first step toward building an automated evaluation framework that can provide detailed feedback on students’ complex assignments.
Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a technology capable of producing designs that challenge those from traditional manufacturing methods. AM is of high interest for advanced capabilities such as leveraging free complexity and having the ability to manufacture multi-part products that are manufactured as a single assembled. By leveraging design heuristics for AM, the final design can be manufactured in a shorter timeframe with less material consumption while still maintaining the initial engineering goals of the design. Despite the promising potential of AM, there is a growing concern that designers are not utilizing the design heuristics that embody successful AM. When designers resort to using design heuristics for Traditional Manufacturing (TM) with the unintentional purpose of translating these heuristics to AM, they are not creating efficient designs for AM and are unable to reap the benefits of using AM. To remedy this problem, intervening early in the design process can help address any concerns regarding the use of AM design heuristics. This work explores the design heuristics that students use in creating designs in the context of TM and AM. Once the common design heuristics students use in their designs are identified, future studies will further investigate the specific features that these students are using to address them through early interventions. This work found that incorporating complex shapes and geometries and considering the minimum feature size are significant axioms for influencing the manufacturability of a design for both TM and AM.
