Abstract:

The Institute for Product Development and Machine Elements (pmd) of Technische Universität Darmstadt focuses on two teaching assignments: machine elements and product development. Especially teaching product development knowledge is challenging, because this kind of knowledge is unsharp and frequently consists of situation dependent instructions. Therefore the pmd developed a teaching, learning and application system called pinngate. The pinngate system does not just aim to display product development knowledge appropriately and user-specific, but also aims to support the whole creation process of teaching documents.
In the following the didactic concept of the product development lectures will be described including besides the face to face teaching and the supervised exercises, the use of the pinngate system to support the students individually. For this reason the pinngate system displays the contents of the lecture scripts user-specific. At the present time three levels, beginners, advancers and experts, can be chosen. In this way, students gain knowledge specially adapted to their current state of knowledge. For beginners the knowledge is displayed in detail with many motivating examples, for advancers a little summarized with additional references, and for experts very short, containing only the main facts.
Further on the paper offers a description of the process that modularizes and categorizes knowledge and aggregates these modules to documents. These documents constitute the input for the visualization part of the pinngate system. The visualization software is coded as a plugin for the learning management system “moodle”. To achieve the user individuality the categorization of knowledge modules is used.
Finally a first analysis will show the success of the pinngate system in teaching product development knowledge.

Keywords:

Engineering design education, product development knowledge, modularization, user-specific documents.