Web-Based Mechanical Engineering Design Education Environment Simulating Design Firms

Mechanical design education focuses on teaching students with fundamental design theory and methodology. Educators systematically introduce design theories, processes, and tools to help students solve design problems. Companies and professional organizations expect that students will be equipped with basic understanding of the engineering practice, and be able to effectively perform independently and in a team environment. Senior capstone design courses, particularly with industry sponsored projects, are widely used to satisfy both education and professional needs of students. This paper presents an education system, which can further facilitate students to acquire design skills in a real-time collaborative, and practical environment. The web-based system helps student teams to: (1) specify the design process for their team projects, (2) organize and distribute tasks among different team members to simulate industry design environment, and (3) get instantaneous access to models, analysis, etc. related to their design. The developed web-based system also contains a knowledge-base that provides students with instructions to setup the design process for projects, and to perform different design tasks. A virtual design organization is created in the system, which is managed by students. In this paper different components of the web-based design education system are presented.