Assisting Designers in Developing Interactive Business Oriented Applications

 The evaluation committee for universities of Finla nd in its evaluation for the degree program in mech anical engineering for 2005 states that mechanical enginee rs’ job descriptions have changed due to fast devel opment of various modelingand simulation applications as well as in tegrated information technology. Education should b e a le to answer this development. In the evolution the lack of competent teachers because of increasing pull from the indus trial sector is raised as one potential problem in the future. The 2005 TEKES (Technology Agency of Finland) MASINAtechnology program’s intermediate report states that an according proble m is continually decreasing student commitment and especially a continues decrease in basic math skills and learnin g ability. Finland will have need and job opportuni ties initially for integrable competence and model based virtual desig ning, which makes the problem even more serious. T hese set especially challenging requirements for competence, as well as for commitment to the field. Education and its con tents related to modern production must be able develop fast, but th at is not enough. New technologies have also signif ica tly changed operational methods and operational environments. T he student must be able to, already during studies, operate in respective operational environments. This leads to the re-evaluation of teaching methods. Teaching met hods must strongly support teamwork skills and the development of inte rnationality. These should not however be studied d tached from the subject matter, but the subject should be studied i n an international networked environment correspond ing to business conditions. There would be demand for new methods a lso from the students perspective, because accordin g to a study targeted toward students in university of applied s ciences done by a National Union of Finnish Polytec hni Students SAMOK in the year 2006, 40% feel that they have not learned much of practical competencies or professi onal expertise and only one-fifth see that they have attained major re adiness for international interaction and cooperati on. One-third of students consider educational offering to have been what the y ave expected and one-third consider education to have been too theoretical. For the sake of motivation it is impor tant that the student understands the bigger pictur e and is able to realize his or her own role in the picture. This creates basis for inter-disciplinary cooperation and specializati on. Motivation is born when the student’s existing competence is recognize d/ acknowledged and the student sees his or her pro gress in learning. The best way to achieve this is in actual working l ife environments, where the student can himself or herself see in which direction his or her own competence should be devel oped. HAMK University of applied sciences has during the 21st-centaury strongly invested in new learning env iro ment technologies in engineer education, where the goal is to offer students the possibilities of physical laboratories and production lines through information networks eithe r by remote-controllable devices and applications o r by various virtual processes simulating real-life phenomena and events . The objective of these has not been to replace ac tual environments but to function as supporting and preparative elements. HAMK has in fact been also widely building laborat oryand educational factory environments wither with their own resource s or by participating broader collaborative project s. As a researchand educational center the vocational teacher education unit supports HAMK’s pedagogical development by gu iding study plan work as well as by developing the student’s guidanc e and competence evaluation. Planning and execution for the educational concept utilizing new educational environments is executed with this engineer education development project. Work covers planning for study entities, restructuring degree programs’ study plans for the needed parts in order for them to support the new l arning environments and utilizing HAMK’s inter-dis ciplinarily quality. Project is funded by The Federation of Finnish Tech nology Industrie. Index Terms  Learning by doing, project learning, production, i formation systems, automation