Page 93 - 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

76 EDUCATING THE ENGINEER OF 2020

The learners are asked the following key questions:

• What strategy did you use to select the parameters to improve
operational efficiency?
• If you could modify the simulation model to allow more pa-
rameters to be changed, which parameters would you choose to
add? Explain your answer.
• Which combination of parameters optimized the manufactur-
ing plant’s operations? Explain your answer.

This case is not about building a computer model. It is about mak-
ing engineering decisions. In the future, methods of simulating real-
world systems will certainly improve. Simulations will be easier to
construct and will encapsulate very real views. These improvements
should be introduced early in the careers of student engineers, not to
teach modeling per se, but to improve their ability to make engineering
decisions.

LEARNING OBJECTS
The Greenfield learning object model (LOM, Figure 3) recognizes
a hierarchy of learning objects (Falkenburg et al., 2003). At the base of

FIGURE 3 Greenfield Learning Object Model.

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