Evaluating the use of cyberinfrastructure in the classroom to enhance product dissection

*Recent cyberinfrastructure initiatives seek to create ubiquitous, comprehensive, interactive, and functionally complete digital environments that consist of people, data, information, tools, and instruments for research communities. With product dissection as our unifying theme, we are forging a cyberinfrastructure to support undergraduate design engineering education through CIBER-U: Cyber-InfrastructureBased Engineering Repositories for Undergraduates. CIBERU pairs two of the nation’s leading design repository developers with several active users and their students to realize a high-impact application of cyberinfrastructure in engineering undergraduate curricula involving freshmen through seniors. Specifically, CIBER-U combines product dissection activities at three universities with two digital design repositories, CAD modeling and animation, video, MediaWiki technology, multimedia, and undergraduate summer research experiences to enable cyberinfrastructure-based product dissection activities. Nearly 700 students have participated in the Phase I efforts of CIBER-U, which have focused primarily on generating, capturing, and storing data in two digital design repositories. Lessons learned from these efforts are presented from the students’ perspectives as well as that of the faculty in both engineering and computer science. The implications for implementing CIBER-U on a national scale are discussed along with ongoing research.

[1]  S. Sheppard.  MECHANICAL DISSECTION: AN EXPERIENCE IN HOW THINGS WORK , 1996 .

[2]  Diane L. Beaudoin,et al.  A Product and Process Engineering Laboratory for Freshmen , 1995 .

[3]  Leonhard E. Bernold,et al.  Update On Impec: An Integrated First Year Engineering Curriculum At N.C. State University , 1997 .

[4]  Edward A. Fox,et al.  Digital libraries , 1995, CACM.

[5]  Margot Brereton.  The role of hardware in learning engineering fundamentals: An empirical study of engineering design and product analysis activity , 1999 .

[6]  Weiming Shen,et al.  A review of Internet-based product information sharing and visualization , 2004, Comput. Ind..

[7]  James E. Groccia,et al.  A Comparative Assessment of Students' Experiences in Two Instructional Formats of an Introductory Materials Science Course , 1997 .

[8]  Alice M. Agogino,et al.  Malking Connections to Engineering During the First Two Years , 1992, Proceedings. Twenty-Second Annual conference Frontiers in Education.

[9]  Daniel Atkins,et al.  Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure , 2003 .

[10]  Ronald E. Barr,et al.  An Introduction to Engineering Through an Integrated Reverse Engineering and Design Graphics Project , 2000 .

[11]  Bruce Carlson,et al.  A Motivational First‐year Electronics Lab Course , 1997 .

[12]  Kevin Otto,et al.  Product Design: Techniques in Reverse Engineering and New Product Development , 2000 .

[13]  Ra Callander,et al.  Teaching engineering design , 1972 .

[14]  John S. Lamancusa,et al.  Learning Engineering by Product Dissection , 1996 .

[15]  Hans Vossensteyn.  Trends and issues in higher education , 2006 .

[16]  John S. Lamancusa,et al.  The Learning Factory—A New Approach to Integrating Design and Manufacturing into the Engineering Curriculum , 1997 .