EVALUATING THE IMPACT OF TABLET COMPUTERS ON DESIGN ENGINEERING

Since 2005, with the endowment of the NSERC-GMCL Chair in Innovative Design Engineering at UOIT, and the Laptop-based, web-centric teaching approach, an ideal setting for the creation, prompt adoption, and implementation of advanced and innovative practices in teaching design engineering have been implemented, in addition to the use of traditional methods. A pilot program was recently completed to evaluate the use of Tablets in an engineering course. Tablets are currently used by faculty for teaching purposes at UOIT, but the program aims to integrate the use of Tablets within courses in the engineering design curriculum, namely for using CAD/CAM/CAE software. As CAD software capabilities improve, greater memory and computer speed is required, making the currently used conventional Laptops less useful for engineering design. In addition, Laptops do not lend themselves to graphical, free-form idea generation. It is intended that Tablets, with improved memory and processing speed, will facilitate CAD software usage, and hence, improve and enhance the overall design learning and application experience. Also, students can take advantage of software such as Microsoft OneNote to create preliminary sketches of designs and improve record-keeping of decisions during team meetings. In this pilot program, Tablet computers were issued to students and instruction personnel in a fourth-year Advanced Mechatronics course at UOIT. In this context, students were able to more efficiently carry out design assignments for term design projects, and students and instructors were able to evaluate the benefits of using Tablets. Overall, it was determined that Tablets were better as an engineering design tool compared to traditional Laptops.