TEACHING PROCESS BASED
ON WORKGROUP DESIGN CLASSES
Adam Cholewa and Krzysztof Psiuk
Department of Fundamentals of Machinery Design, Silesian Technical University, Konarskiego 18a, Gliwice, Poland
Keywords: Fundamentals of machinery design, Modelling, UML, Working group, Didactic process.
Abstract: The paper presents a concept of a system for remote teaching of design(in Fundamentals of Machinery
Design). The system takes into account the possibility of designing in a working group. The approach was
presented using UML diagrams. It also provides software that working group are supported by. Appropriate
software configuration required for the system was also described. The concept of that system was verified
with the use of an example design task, in which the two designers took part. The designers were students of
technical university. The paper describes obtained results.
1 INTRODUCTION
The aim of this paper is to present a way of teaching
of Fundamentals of Machinery Design (FMD) in
technical university. The teaching of the FMD
should take into account the transfer of general
engineering knowledge as well as skills of carrying
out individual or group design tasks. Because of
that, important elements of these types of classes are
design classes. The FMD design classes are specific
activities. Considerable students' as well as teachers'
effort has to be put into them. This arises from the
fact that a considerable number of such classes shall
be taken in the form of consultations. Even more
important seems to be an introduction of teamwork
and joint problem-solving outlines. For this purpose,
an attempt to development of assumptions regarding
a computer aided system for design classes has been
elaborated. In this system design tasks are carried
out jointly by several persons. One took also into
consideration development of computer technology
and the availability of the Internet. This let us
introduce remote classes based on group work.
Unfortunately most systems developed for the
purpose of carrying out classes via the Internet do
not provide the tools for group work. Therefore, the
work undertaken has been related to the
development of the system that aided teaching of the
design classes remotely.
The problem discussed in this article is described
in the Computer Supported Cooperative Work
(CSCW). The CSCW focuses on suitable forms of
cooperation between users to perform a common
task. It supports a range of applications such as
shared editors, many type of conferencing,
computerized meeting rooms, group design tools,
coauthoring systems, shared calendars, workflow
system, voting tools, whiteboard and message based
conferencing (Iqbal, R.; James, A.; Gatward, R.,
2003). It is possible to find some examples of this
kind of solutions (Twidale, M.B., Nichols, D.M.,
1998), (Neto R.B, Jardim C., Camacho-Guerrero J.,
da Graca Pimentel M., 2004). But this paper presents
a solution based on the use of Autodesk Vault
application. We try to use in teaching process an
existing type of application, that was designed for
file management and is applicable in industry.
2 TEAM WORKING IN
EDUCATIONAL PROCESS
The purpose of this paper is to present problems
connected with teaching of fundamentals of
machinery design in a form of design classes.
Special attention was paid to these classes where a
single design task is being solved by many students
together. It must be underlined that usually this type
of classes is conducted by many people. Each of
them plays a different role. Thus, participants of the
classes are teachers as well as students. It is possible
to distinguish some variants of this type of work.
However the most interesting one is when many
442
Cholewa A. and Psiuk K. (2010).
TEACHING PROCESS BASED ON WORKGROUP DESIGN CLASSES.
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 442-445
DOI: 10.5220/0002793604420445
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

students resolve a design task simultaneously and at
the same time they are controlled by many teachers.
One should take into account not only the possibility
of communication between teachers but also
between students. In such case the communication
between students and teachers must not be skipped.
Appropriate methods for assisting the organization
of classes and preparing tools that enable us to
standardize achieved results are necessary to be
elaborated for the controlled design work.
There are some problems that should be solved
in this case:
 a creative work,
 information exchange between students,
 the simultaneous work on the same project by a
few students,
 information exchange with teachers,
 monitoring progress of the work,
 version management of project components.
To enable remote accomplishments of these
types of tasks a special supporting system has been
prepared. When preparing the system two main
assumptions were made:
 the system should enable the resource sharing
in a distributed environment,
 the system should guarantee work in the an
asynchronous way.
A demonstration study of the system is described in
the next point.
3 SYSTEM SUPPORTING TEAM
WORKING IN THE TEACHING
PROCESS
There are many systems supporting team works
available. In the system were used the solution based
on ideas drawn up by the Autodesk company
described in the paper. They were selected because
of the abilities of these tools and their full
integration. The accessibility of these tools in
Department of Fundamentals of Machinery Design
of The Silesian University of Technology at Gliwice
and experience associated with their usage both as
part of research as well as design work was also
taken into consideration. Two tools of Autodesk
company were employed for preparing the system.
The first one is Autodesk Inventor version 2009.
Autodesk Inventor was used as a CAD tool for
supporting tasks connected with designing and 3D
modelling. The second was Autodesk Vault.
Autodesk Vault is used as a tool for integration of
files obtained as a result of the designing process.
The Inventor program was used mainly as the
designing tool. The application of Vault program
enables the simultaneous work of many persons,
manages of the work results (files and projects) and
determines and ensures access rights for users.
The work on the system began with preparing
assumptions associated with requirements related to
the application of the system. The main problem was
how to define communication methods between all
persons participating in the design work. As it was
stated before it was necessary to determine methods
of the information exchange between students,
teachers and both of them.
A certain patterns of procedures for this purpose
were prepared. All these procedures were divided
into two groups. Patterns of procedures connected
with the team work and patterns of procedures
connected with the project supervision. The first
patterns included among other things:
 document exchange methods (documents could
be saved as files or as records in a database),
 information exchange methods (communication
between project participants)
The UML language was used for developing
procedures schema (Larman, 2002, Dennis, 2002).
This language is very useful for resolving these
kinds of problems. A use case diagram was used for
modelling the communication methods. The first
considered issue was to determine the method of the
exchange of documents, which are elements of the
project. This diagram describes how some students
working on the same project can exchange
documents.
It was assumed that all documents should be
stored in one place. Separate project users would
borrow necessary resources as documents. After
they finish their work, all borrowed documents
should be returned. It was assumed that all
documents could be borrowed as “read only mode”
or in “edit mode”. If a document is borrowed in edit
mode, it will be blocked for editing for other users of
the system. But all users could borrow the document
in read only mode. In this way numerous tasks could
be realised by many users. When users create new
documents, then each of the document has to be
added into the project resources. The attempt to
borrow the document should be preceded by the
inspection if the document is available. In such the
case, it has to be blocked for editing and after that it
could be borrowed for editing. When the user
finishes editing the document it can be left handed
over for shared use and unblocked. In case when a
document is borrowed for editing, a user should
receive an appropriate information.
TEACHING PROCESS BASED ON WORKGROUP DESIGN CLASSES
443

The next problem which had to be solved was
defining how to exchange information on performed
modifications and realised works. It was assumed
that changes could be introduced by students.
Information about each modification made in the
project should be sent to all users that work on this
project. After that, each user could relate to this
information and send its own commentary.
The second group of patterns of procedures
which were elaborated for the system includes
patterns of procedures connected with the project
supervision. In this case actions connected with:
 confirmation of each project task stages,
 general project supervision were included.
System Server
Vault server
student
Teacher
Inventor program
and Vault client
Vault client
student
Teacher
Vault client
Inventor program
and Vault client
Internet
Figure 1: The general schema of the system of group
working.
In the first case it was assumed that each student
that participates in the project is evaluated
individually. Each student is responsible for
presenting a task to his/her teacher. Every task
assumed as a part of the project is being explained
individually and for such cases a pattern of the
procedure was prepared. The core of the whole
project was being controlled together by all teachers.
The works on the project were divided into a few
stages. Stages were distinguished on the basis of the
design and construction process stages. Some were
related to conceptual task performing, projecting and
designing. Particular stages were considered as the
whole work of the whole team. They should be
accepted as the whole work by all of the teachers.
Every student had to realize his/her tasks and
coordinate it with other students. After finishing the
given stage the student reported it to the teacher for
approving results of his/her works. If all teachers
accepted their work at a determined stage it was
possible to leave it for the accomplishment of the
next stage. All stages approval finished performing
the design task.
Elaborated patterns of procedures allowed us to
prepare a general structure of the system supporting
team work in didactic process. The general schema
of the system was presented in Fig. 1. This system
was based on two tools – the Inventor program and
the Vault program. The main assumption of the
system was to make possible performing project
tasks by many students simultaneously and with
many teachers in a distributed environment. To
make it possible they received a special server with
Vault program. Every user of that system had an
inventor program to realize designing process and a
Vault Client program to exchange documents with
Vault Server. Thanks to this tools every student and
teacher had access to the project resources. As the
result everybody could look through resources, edit
them and add comments.
4 APPLICATION OF THE
SYSTEM. AN EXAMPLE
In order to validate the assumptions and procedures
of the proposed system the whole system was tested.
The first tests were made on a group of two students
of the ninth and tenth semester. Students designed a
device for counting and packing plastic disposable
plates. Subject of the work was prepared in such a
way that it could be performed as a work group.
The first stage of this work was preparation and
setting up the tools. This task included, among
others:
 Vault server configuration,
 Preparation and configuration of the program
Vault,
 Preparation and configuration of the Vault
client.
In accordance with adopted and developed
patterns the tasks were divided in such a way that
each student could perform some tasks. At the first
stage which is called the concept development stage,
students worked together to solve the determined
problem. The results of the work were presented
jointly by two participants in the task. These ideas
had been evaluated and considering the adopted
criteria one proposition had been selected and
approved for further work. The process to propose
the concept as well as evaluation of the concept had
been conducted on the basis of proposed patterns of
the procedures.
At a later stage the design works were carried
out. The device project completed the works. In
accordance with the accepted patterns of the
procedures the individual tasks had been consulted
and supervised by leading lecturers. Majority of the
work had been carried out jointly by the students and
required them to exchange information and to agree
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on details of the joint design solutions. After
completion of the design phase and approval by
leading teachers, it was proceeded to the final stage
which is the stage of constructing.
All the work was carried out based on the
proposed utility. The program Vault, allowed us to
collect various resources used in this project. It also
let us to determine the version of individual files that
were created and modified in the project. For each
file a comment could be placed and everyone could
check who changed the file and when it was
modified.
5 FINAL REMARKS AND
CONCLUSIONS
The presented project has been carried out and based
on the used tools and developed patterns of the
procedures. The whole job came out to be a success,
despite some difficulties associated with a disease of
one of the participants in the project and delays
resulting from that. Verification of the software
implementation (in our case Autodesk Vault), based
on which the system was implemented has been also
completed positively.
Carrying out the design work in the work group
of technical university was not an easy task. This
type of tasks require intensive work from both the
students and the work group leaders. Basing on the
work that had been carried out, it could be defined a
number of indicators how to decrease the risk of
design task failure. These instructions included the
following points:
 this task should be divided into topics, each of
which may be a separate entity,
 in addition to communication taking place
electronically, it is required to make meeting
with work group leaders, mainly at the
conceptual process stage,
 system should be complemented providing a
tool for an online conversation. Currently only
asynchronous information exchange is
possible.
It should be also noted that such tasks are not too
often carried out within the framework of the project
activities realized by students at the technical
university. The reason is the delays generated by
members of the group influence of delay of the
entire collective work. Despite the difficulties the
work was well accepted by students participating in
the experiment.
It is also noteworthy that at present two further
works carried out in the same system have been
completed. The main difference compared to the
results presented in this paper is that the age of
participants was lower and the tasks of the project
increased the size of the group. One of the
completed projects was implemented in a special
work done by students of the seventh semester,
while the second task of the project was
implemented by students of the ninth and tenth
semester. The size of each group involved three
students and three lecturers. Both design tasks were
completed successfully.
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