EXAMPLE BASED LEARNING FOR VIRTUAL PROTOTYPING ENGINEERING

The paper deals with a method used many years for example based learning for the virtual prototyping. The authors collaborate since ten years in Erasmus background. It means four French students a year in the bachelor of technology course got a three months placement in Romania supervised by the authors. They are applying this learning method described here. The investigation domain is the virtual prototyping. The virtual product development replaces traditional material object test with digitized form product by building product's digital model. It offers to analyze product's static and dynamic characteristics on the circumstance of digital state, and rebuild and improve the original design. The virtual prototype technology carries out any product optimization. Virtual prototype technology is a kind of engineering method which can shorten new product development cycles by replacing cost physical prototype with virtual digital model. The subject detailed here deals with a virtual prototyping using Delphi programming environment. The example based teaching method is thus applied. There are several potential advantages of example based learning programs, including the ability for people to learn from their homes and study without the assistance of an instructor. As the use of computers in life is increasing, all teaching methods and strategies should be renewed to match with the advancement of technology. It means that videos, texts, lessons, answered homeworks in electronics format should be easily downloaded by any new learners. The method proposed takes 3 main steps. The first step offers the connected student to download as many examples as he wants. Any example is given in an executable format only. The student launches the example, takes notes and comments on the scenario and writes down new ideas on a working platform. The second step is devoted to the discovery of the application language. A given example is given to the student including the source code. At that moment, the student can slightly change any code line and check at once the positive or negative effects. The third step is based on the invention of the personalized virtual prototype. In that last step, the student uses his own imagination in order to create a product and sometimes to obtain a patent. The paper ends with two examples of virtual prototypes created in order to support technical design in construction and automatics engineering and draws some conclusions.