Engineering workspaces, designing

Recognize the importance of design-implement experiences and supporting engineering workspaces in the educational infrastructure. 

Product, process, and system design and implementation. This category represents the most obvious major mode of teaching and learning that takes place in an engineering workspace. However, it should also be recognized that there are many variations of this mode with different requirements for the design of the workspace. 

Community building. Engineering workspaces also play a central role in building community among students. In addition to working on their design-implement projects, students use the workspaces to study for disciplinary courses and for... 

Design-implement experiences (Std 5) and engineering workspaces (Std 6) seem to be the focns at the start of a program s reform initiatives. 

Self-reports and site visits indicate significant development and high degrees of student engagement in design-implement experiences and engineering workspaces. 

From the work context window, the user may activate design tools for operating on the documents contained in the workspace. Here, the user invokes a flowsheet editor [21] in order to insert reaction alternatives into the flowsheet for the Polyamide-6 process. The flowsheet editor, which was also developed in the IMPROVE project, is based on MS Visio, a commercial drawing tool, which was integrated with the PRIME process engine [371]. 

The groupware system EVA consists primarily of a shared work space that all users of a chemical design project can access (Fig. 5.44). In this workspace all of the documents created during a project are inserted and displayed in a structured way. As a result, the work area presents the center for the project-internal and primarily asynchronous information exchange. It also gives a structured overview of the relevant information and procedures throughout a development process in chemical engineering. The structure of the work area was derived from the abstraction-decomposition space introduced in Fig. 5.42. 

Design-implement experiences set in both the classroom and in modem learning workspaces as the basis for engineering-based experiential learning. 

If we are to emphasize that conceiving, designing, implementing, and operating is the context of engineering, it is desirable to make the spaces in which students work explicitly reflect these phases. Facilities need to be flexible and multifunctional, supporting information-based, as well as hardware-based, projects. Workspaces typically support learning about the four phases of CDIO in four different kinds of spaces, as illustrated in Fig. 5.3 [11]. 

Student surveys show that students respond positively to woikshop environments where they have opportunities to conceive, design, implement, and operate engineering products, processes, and systems as part of the curriculum and in extracurricular activities. Students responses to these workspace initiatives has been uniformly positive at all participaling universities. As an example, surveys at MTT show that graduating students in the aerospace program feel that the redesigned workspaces have not only increased their abifity to learn disciplinary material, but also increased their positive feelings towards their classmates and their chosen profession. 

Young, P. W., Malmqvist, J., Hallstrom, S., Kuttenkeuler, J., Svensson, T., Cunningham, G. C. (2005). Design and development of CDIO student workspaces—lessons learned. In Proceeding of the 2005 Annual Conference and Exhibition of the American Society of Engineering Education, Portland, Oregon, 2005. 

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