Background and justification of the project
The course ‘Model-based systems engineering’ is an elective Bachelor course that teaches model-based design of high tech systems: the entire development process of supervisory controllers, including simulation-based validation and visualization, real-time control and testing on an actual production system. Approximately 180 students take this elective third year bachelor course each year. All information and learning material is available via the website of the course (4tc00.wtb.tue.nl), apart from the quizzes that are available via Canvas.
After years of incremental improvements to the course, based on student feedback in questionnaires and close interaction with the students during the course, we realized that for further improvements, fundamental changes to the setup of the course were needed.
Objectives and expected outcomes
- Version control support: A set of fully working and tested tools that support the use of versioning control software in 4TC00, including dividing the students into groups, setting up a private repository for each group and downloading the submissions from the repositories for grading.
- Digital twins: Four 3D digital twins, one for each Festo workstation used in the course, including associated explanation on how to use the digital twins on the website, which is freely accessible for all other potential interested teachers of TU/e courses.
- Plagiarism detection in models: A working and fully tested tool for plagiarism detection.
- Course improvements for time and place independent learning (TPIL): improvement of the course website, exercises, quizzes and lectures.
- Automated testing and grading tool set: An automated testing and grading toolset for the plant model of the student teams, and a simplified version to be made available to the students.
Project design and management
The teacher will collaborate with two PhD students, a varying number of teacher assistants and a scientific programmer. The figure below shows the projects phases and activities over the years.
Dissemination and sustainability of the project
In this project, dissemination is not an afterthought, but is integrated in the project as an essential part from the very beginning. We are happy to mention that we have already established cooperation with Marc Hamilton, fellow at the High Tech Systems Center (HTSC), who is very happy to provide support for our project on Digital Twins in education, based on the shared infrastructure developed by the combined effort of the HTSC and the Eindhoven Artificial Intelligence Systems Institute (EAISI). This cooperation embeds our work on Digital Twins in education, with the ongoing TU/e wide research on Digital Twins, and will ensure maximum outreach of the result of our work on Digital Twins in education. During the first year of the project, several other professors have already expressed interest in the results of the project.
Dissemination will take place in stages. First, we will provide our results to be used by interested parties with sufficient ICT background to understand and can use innovations in pre-release stage. Towards the end of the project, we aim to provide the results of our project in user-friendly and robust form, so that it can be used by teachers without any prior knowledge of version control systems, digital twins, or software for plagiarism detection in models. Dissemination will take place in close cooperation with ESA, by presenting the results of the project at yearly educational days of the faculty of Mechanical Engineering, and other faculties if possible. Furthermore, by directly contacting potentially interested teachers.
Results and learnings
This project is still ongoing.
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