Bender – An Educational Game for Teaching Agile Hardware Development

Within this paper, an educational game is presented that transfers Agile principles for the development of physical systems. The training leverages elements of Learning Factories (LF) to simulate an Agile hardware development project within two days. By doing so, the challenges of applying Agile within the hardware domain are realistically reflected. The training revolves around a physical wire bending machine, which a development team of four participants needs to modify within a realistic engineering and production setting. A trial with mechanical engineering students was conducted to validate the training design. The participants showed a positive attitude towards the active learning approach. Furthermore, the students expressed that they perceived the game to improve their learning regarding Agile hardware development

Teaching agile hardware development with an open‐source engineering simulator: An evaluation with industry participants

Educational games are increasingly used to teach Agile development approaches to practitioners. Most of these training modules simplify the development environment, for example, by using LEGO bricks or playing cards. This oversimplification has been shown to result in limited transferability of learning to industrial practice. Furthermore, there is a lack of teaching modules that specifically address the challenges of applying Agile to physical products. In this paper, we present an open-source educational game that realistically simulates a hardware development project to teach Agile principles. Over 2 days, participants design, manufacture, and test modifications for a physical wire bending machine within an authentic engineering and production setting. The training mimics the typical roles, processes, and tools of industrial engineering teams to reflect the challenges of Agile hardware development. The module was evaluated with 44 industry professionals regarding perceived learning and user reaction. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was used for the experimental evaluation. The results showed a positive learning effect as the participants\u27 average agreement with Agile principles increased through the training. Concerning user reaction, respondents reported a high degree of relevance, interaction, and confidence, indicating that the realistic simulation of the hardware development appropriately balanced the degree of realism with simplicity. The study showcases the opportunities of properly aligning game components to provoke learning situations targeted by the instructors. It contributes to the extant literature by providing a design framework (product, process, setting, and instruction) and open-source access to the tools used for implementation

Bender – An Educational Game for Teaching Agile Hardware Development

Within this paper, an educational game is presented that transfers Agile principles for the development of physical systems. The training leverages elements of Learning Factories (LF) to simulate an Agile hardware development project within two days. By doing so, the challenges of applying Agile within the hardware domain are realistically reflected. The training revolves around a physical wire bending machine, which a development team of four participants needs to modify within a realistic engineering and production setting. A trial with mechanical engineering students was conducted to validate the training design. The participants showed a positive attitude towards the active learning approach. Furthermore, the students expressed that they perceived the game to improve their learning regarding Agile hardware development.ISSN:2351-978

Teaching agile hardware development with an open-source engineering simulator: An evaluation with industry participants

Educational games are increasingly used to teach Agile development approaches to practitioners. Most of these training modules simplify the development environment, for example, by using LEGO bricks or playing cards. This oversimplification has been shown to result in limited transferability of learning to industrial practice. Furthermore, there is a lack of teaching modules that specifically address the challenges of applying Agile to physical products. In this paper, we present an open-source educational game that realistically simulates a hardware development project to teach Agile principles. Over 2 days, participants design, manufacture, and test modifications for a physical wire bending machine within an authentic engineering and production setting. The training mimics the typical roles, processes, and tools of industrial engineering teams to reflect the challenges of Agile hardware development. The module was evaluated with 44 industry professionals regarding perceived learning and user reaction. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was used for the experimental evaluation. The results showed a positive learning effect as the participants' average agreement with Agile principles increased through the training. Concerning user reaction, respondents reported a high degree of relevance, interaction, and confidence, indicating that the realistic simulation of the hardware development appropriately balanced the degree of realism with simplicity. The study showcases the opportunities of properly aligning game components to provoke learning situations targeted by the instructors. It contributes to the extant literature by providing a design framework (product, process, setting, and instruction) and open-source access to the tools used for implementation.ISSN:1099-0542ISSN:1061-377

Recognition of Additive Manufacturing Parts Based on Neural Networks and Synthetic Training Data: A Generalized End-to-End Workflow

Additive manufacturing (AM) is becoming increasingly relevant among established manufacturing processes. AM parts must often be recognized to sort them for part- or order-specific post-processing. Typically, the part recognition is performed manually, which represents a bottleneck in the AM process chain. To address this challenge, a generalized end-to-end workflow for automated visual real-time recognition of AM parts is presented, optimized, and evaluated. In the workflow, synthetic training images are generated from digital AM part models via rendering. These images are used to train a neural network for image classification, which can recognize the printed AM parts without design adaptations. As each production batch can consist of new parts, the workflow is generalized to be applicable to individual batches without adaptation. Data generation, network training and image classification are optimized in terms of the hardware requirements and computational resources for industrial applicability at low cost. For this, the influences of the neural network structure, the integration of a physics simulation in the rendering process and the total number of training images per AM part are analyzed. The proposed workflow is evaluated in an industrial case study involving 215 distinct AM part geometries. Part classification accuracies of 99.04% (top three) and 90.37% (top one) are achieved.ISSN:2076-341