Abstract:

Students, like most humans, are nowadays conditioned to instant gratification. This behavior partly results from the daily usage of our mobile phones and the apps which manipulate our perception, e.g. the never-ending feed of social media (e.g. Instagram), the constant pop-ups of messenger apps (e.g. Whatsapp) or the built-in gamification of learning apps (e.g. Duolingo). When teaching students, this creates multiples challenges: e.g. a potentially reduced attention span, lower productivity, difficulty to focus on tasks or the mentioned need for instant gratification.

For students to be successful during their academic journey and in industry, they need to be able focus, fight their urge to get instant gratification, experience failures and learn from those mistakes. This is why in this paper, a teaching approach is presented that explicitly integrates failures into the learning process to design mechatronic systems.

The teaching approach consists of a problem-based learning and high collaboration setup to mimic real-world conditions. The applied development process is based on the V-model framework for the design of mechatronic systems (Guideline 2221 by the VDI*, *=Association of German Engineers). It is used widely today in industry and originates from a systems engineering perspective in the late 1980. It starts by providing the students a clear design goal for their system. They need to design and build a prototype for a rope-winch that can pull a car of approximately 1400 kg. Up to five students can work together in one team and each team must follow the preset methodical approach of the the V-model. The necessary design steps include identifying all requirements, generate functional structures, choose working principles and design, manufacture and test their chosen concept in form of a prototype.

During this design process, students are required to early on generate multiple physical mockups or prototypes of their designed parts and test them. This often results in mechanical failures for those parts and leads to iterations of the design. In contrast to an industrial setup, this is a welcomed and intended experience, because it clearly shows the students why parts fail and how to improve them. Furthermore, it also helps the students to convert the theoretical knowledge of the lectures into practical experiences, which are far better memorized.

At the end of the course, all students must present and test their final prototype of the winch and pull a real car over a given distance. During the recent instances of this course, all students have been able to achieve the design goal and successfully complete the challenge, with varying effort and last minute fixes required. Nevertheless, all teams collaborated successfully and the derived gratification of achieving the set project goal was rated very high by students.

This paper concludes with a critical review of the presented teaching approach, the difficulties the students had to face, the needed effort for the lecturer and the students, their experiences and results as well as the effectiveness of their collaboration. Furthermore, it is discussed how the results can be transferred from mechanical engineering to different domains and how failures can be integrated on purpose in a problem-based learning setup.

Keywords:

failures, education, problem-based learning, instant gratification, collaboration, mechanical engineering.