INTEGRATED LEARNING OF COMPUTER APPLICATIONS FOR PRODUCTION ENGINEERING

In the professional activities posterior to graduation, productivity becomes a central aspect and a high productivity rate is related with a proper management of the flow of the large quantities of information and related decision making that are consubstantial to the engineering processes both in design and production activities. Dealing with such problems from an integrated point of view and mimicking real scenarios is not given much attention in Engineering degrees. The reason for such neglect lies on the difficulties for reproducing, in learning environments, the aforementioned information flows. Actually, in the context of Engineering Education, there are a number of courses designed for developing specific competencies, as required by the academic curricula, but not that many in which integration competencies are the main target. In this paper, a course devoted to that aim is discussed. The course is taught in a Marine Engineering degree but the philosophy could be used in any Engineering field. The first part of that course is dedicated to Project Management: the students acquire skills in defining, using Ms-PROJECT, the work breakdown structure (WBS), and the organization breakdown structure (OBS) in Engineering projects, through a series of examples of increasing complexity, ending up with the case of vessel construction. The second part of the course is dedicated to the use of a data base manager, Ms-ACCESS, for managing production related information. A series of increasing complexity examples is treated ending up with the elaboration of the pipe data base of a real vessel. This data base consists of a few thousand of pipes, for which a production timing frame is defined, which connects this part of the course with the first one. Finally, the third part of the course is devoted to the work with FORAN, an Engineering Production package of widespread in shipbuilding industry. With this package, the piping definition, from functional systems drafts is carried out, thus providing the information for the piping database. The lessons are given in a computer room with every student working directly with the three packages. Experts from the three fields turn up for specific parts of the course, incorporating their experience not by descriptive speeches but by discussing the details of the problems enriching the treated ideas. In the paper, specific details about the learning process are given. A survey has been posed to the students in order to get feed-back from their experience as well as to assess their satisfaction with the learning process. Results from that survey are discussed in the paper.