Page 90 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11338.html

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 73

explore a real factory of a tier-1 auto supplier, with access to process
plans, production data, scrap reports, and interviews with key person-
nel. Figure 1 displays the web interface for a case developed by the
Greenfield Coalition, which targets a boring operation used in the
manufacture of a pulley. In the future, with improved hardware and
software, learners will be able to immerse themselves in the problem-
solving and decision-making experience. Instead of “canned” inter-
views, the learner and intelligent computer systems will provide re-
sponses to learner inquiries.
Case studies can also be used to introduce students to the complex
interactions among technology, business, and ethics. The Laboratory
for Innovative Technology in Engineering Education at Auburn Uni-
versity has produced a number of case studies. One of these describes a
turbine-generator unit in a power plant that vibrates heavily enough to
shake the building. Two engineers recommend different solutions, and
the plant manager must make a decision that could cost the company
millions of dollars (Raju and Sankar, 2000).

Simulation: Improving Understanding and Decision Making
Many of us already feel comfortable teaching computer simulation
to enhance problem-solving skills. The problem is that we most fre-
quently focus on the development of computer models to represent an
engineering component or system, and we frequently forget to talk
about the reason we build models—to improve students’ ability to make
engineering decisions.

The future will bring improved methods of simulating
real-world systems. Those simulations will be easier to
construct and encapsulate very real views. Simulation technol-
ogy should be used early in the career of the student engineer,
not to teach modeling per se, but to enhance the student’s
ability to make engineering decisions.

In Manufacturing Systems, a sophomore-level Greenfield Coali-
tion course developed by Professor Emory Zimmers at Lehigh Univer-
sity, learners are introduced to Colebee Time Management Incorpo-
rated, a firm that has determined that rapid order fulfillment is one of
their competitive advantages. As they move toward producing more

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