RPML'ers,
I am writing to ask for some help. I have taught a Rapid Prototyping course
online twice over the past two years and am not happy with the results.
Obviously, RP can be a hands-on experiential course, but with the distance
learning paradigm, that is not so easy to do. The two times I've taught
this, I had students located out of state.
I am writing to ask if any of you have suggestions for the types of RP
topics that you think could be done well in a web-based course where the
students are distributed around the country. I have asked them to design
a part as an exercise and email me the .stl file, we made it, sent it back
and discussed the results. But, that has not produced the type of
interaction or learning that I really want.
I feel that there are topics that can be done well at a distance such as
material selection, the product realization process in relation to RP and
certainly an overview of the various technologies. I use websites liberally
in this course, and the companies have done a reasonable job of showing how
the machines work.
But, in an engineering curriculum, I believe there needs to be some more
"meat" including modeling and analysis. I certainly would appreciate some
comments from any of you who teach RP (including a topics list) and also
from those of you who use RP because we are trying to prepare engineers for
industry.
Thanks.
Mark Henderson
Professor of Industrial Engineering
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-5906
Phone: (480)965-2899
Fax: (480)965-8692
For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:53:28 EEST