Multimedia systems and intelligent tutors for teaching design for manufacturing

Our group has built design for manufacturing computer modules which instruct students on efficient procedures for designing parts for manufacture across the curriculum. The goal is to assist engineering students to gain a deeper understanding of the interaction between features of a part being designed and the corresponding manufacturing requirements of the part in injection molding, sheet metal stamping, and finite element analysis. Animated sequences of the processes are either generated dynamically or indexed according to the possible designs. Students create designs, and the tooling complexity is demonstrated through both 2D and 3D animations. An underlying internal representation of the part being designed provides a nonintrusive critique mechanism to provide feedback to the student.