COOPERATIVE AND APPLICATION-ORIENTED LEARNING IN ENGINEERING DESIGN - SYSTEMS DESIGN METHODOLOGY EDUCATED ON SOLUTIONS FOR MOUSETRAP-POWERED VEHICLES

According to recent studies, scientists and trend researchers are both quite confident that changes within the next two decades will be much more extensive and pioneering than the changes during the past 20-25 years. Having all the emerging technological trends and visions in mind (e.g., artificial intelligence or the IoT platform), the complexity will achieve an entirely new dimension within our knowledge-based society. In order to be successful in future, engineers or actually young aspirants need to change their learning behaviour to overcome these new issues in complexity management. Hence, cooperative and application-oriented learning including an exchange of knowledge and experience is increasingly gaining in importance, especially in view of the abstract and holistic thinking within the field of systems engineering. Dealing with this future complexity and difficulty, this contribution presents an innovative manner of transferring knowledge in a considerably practice-oriented way within the largely theory-based subject of "systems design methodology" for first semester bachelor students. In doing so, the pursued systematic product development procedure deals with the prospectively more important aspects of an integrated view on product design, material and technology selection as well as soft skills issues such as showing individual initiative, innovative spirit and time management, apart from social competences (e.g., appropriate teamwork skills as well as a strong ability to communicate and critical faculty).