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The Multimedia Virtual Disk Drive Design Studio is a project aimed at developing multimedia interactive courseware for undergraduate engineering and science students. This project is funded by the Synthesis Coalition, a national engineering coalition supported by the National Science Foundation. The purpose of the Synthesis Coalition is to design, implement and assess new approaches to
undergraduate engineering education that emphasize multidisciplinary synthesis, teamwork and communication, hands-on and laboratory experiences and open-ended problem formulation and solving. The purpose of this multimedia project is to introduce students to the world of mechatronics and "real-life" engineering practices. This piece of role-playing interactive software allows students to become design engineers in a fictitious disk drive design firm. Obviously, most students will not have any in-depth knowledge of disk drives and will have to mine out the necessary information from a multimedia archive. Subsequently, they will have to select from various design options and construct their own disk drives. At the same time, students will have to keep track of the development and production cost. They will also be asked to launch their new disk drives in a certain time frame, simulating the idea of time-to-market. The entire project is developed with Macromedia Director. This cross-platform software will allow Synthesis to distribute CD-ROMs to a wide spectrum of students around the country with 2x CD-ROM drives. The author is currently collaborating with Western Digital Corporation and IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose. Western Digital Corp. provided the mathematical model for performance calculations while IBM has contributed in the form of technical literature and expert opinions. For some sample screen shots, take a closer look! |