RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

Recent studies have shown that humans retain only 20 percent of what they hear, 40 percent of what they hear and observe, and 75 percent of what they hear, observe and practice. The ability to visualize and interact is significant and essential skills for successful engineers. With the advent of multimedia technology, existing powerful digital computers now incorporate audio, animation, still images, and motion video to its vast array of capabilities. By incorporating the full range of the human sensory experience, multimedia educational applications now can allow students to learn in an intuitive way, and help change how they learn and what they learn [1, 5].

Manufacturing is a dynamic and interdisciplinary environment, and the types of analysis, modeling, and decision-making required to integrate design and manufacturing in real-world applications are beyond the scope of most lecture and textbook materials. Modular multimedia materials enable us to capture many of these issues, and create earning environments which help in understanding the complexities facing enterprises competing in an increasingly global marketplace. The focus of the development is on electronics design and manufacturing. In the Cybertronics interactive simulation game, they create a fictional enterprise, the Cybertronics Corporation, in which the user assumes the role of product designer, manufacturing engineer, marketing expert, and product manager. In working through the decisions required in product development, the user addresses the tradeoff among product performance, cost, quality, and time-to-market. The Cybertronics simulation game has been developed in a modular architecture using Multimedia Director as the development environment. The focus of Cybertronics is on electronics manufacturing and the processes involved in the design and manufacturing of circuit-board assemblies for commercial and military electronics products.

The electronic “factory floor” can extend the hands-on experience of students to include factory settings at remote sites through the Internet. The Video resource will be complementary to the course material and hands-on experience.

Some of the features that the video option can provide are the following:

1) Videos that illustrate the functioning of machines; these videos can be part of interactive software described in the “Factor Floor” resource. Sometimes machine dealers can provide such tutorial videos;

2) Videos of plant tours; this can be useful in providing a real world context for the machines or processes that are being studied;

3) Videos of seminars offered by industry experts; these videos can be of seminars offered by visiting experts or

4) Educational videos related to the course subject; there is a rich source of videos available through educational associations such as SME, ASEE, and IEEE that can be used to complement classroom and laboratory experiences. Lately, there are also commercial educational software in basic software programming such as Lotus TM spreadsheet software, DBASETM database software, word processors, and others