Cybertronics: Interactive Simulation Game for Design and Manufacturing
Education
Arthur Sanderson, Don Millard, William Jennings, Tom Krawczyk, Diana Slattery,
Susan Walsh Sanderson (School of Management)
Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering
Interactive Learning Modules Project
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY 12180
Abstract Manufacturing is increasingly important to
the balanced education of engineers in all disciplines.
While specific operations and processes can often be
taught in the classroom, it is difficult to convey a
broader understanding of the interrelationship among
design, manufacturing, and marketing, and the
coordinated effort required to meet the demands of a
global marketplace with high product variety and rapid
response requirements. In the Cybertronics interactive
simulation game, we 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 major components
include: Electronics Handbook, Manufacturing
Handbook, Functional Design, Parts Ordering,
Manufacturing Layout and Planning, Manufacturing
Control, and Market and Sales. Each section is an
enhanced multimedia module with access to video (e.g.
manufacturing operations in a factory) and animation
(e.g. depiction of manufacturing process principles).
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.
Cybertronics has been used in both undergraduate and
graduate courses in engineering and management at
Rensselaer, and also in corporate training sessions. A
formal evaluation process of Cybertronics in the
classroom has shown that the experience is effective in
presenting the principles of manufacturing activities,
and has been especially successful in motivating
students to understand the larger context of their
engineering and management decisions.
1 Introduction
Many aspects of manufacturing education do not lend
themselves to traditional approaches to organization and
presentation of materials. 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
learning environments which help in understanding the
complexities facing enterprises competing in an
increasingly global marketplace.
The principal goal of the ILM project is to
develop modular interactive learning materials for
manufacturing education, and demonstrate their
effectiveness in both university curricula and industrial
training programs. The focus of the development is on
electronics design and manufacturing. Several different
types of modules are used to create an interactive
environment for learning:
(1). Interactive design tools: Modules for
functional and physical design of electronic circuit
boards, and for layout and planning of electronics
manufacturing activities are being developed.
(2). Multimedia case studies: Case studies of
product development, management, and manufacturing
are being developed to explain and analyze the
principles which affect manufacturing decisions. An
electronics manufacturing line is designed to bring the
factory to the user, and incorporates principles of
design, fabrication, assembly, solder, and test. Video
of a real factory is combined with simulation and
animation to study the choice of manufacturing systems
and the scheduling of activities.
(3). Interactive simulation modules: Integrated
simulation takes special advantage of the multimedia
environment and involves the user in the decision-
making and design processes associated with the
manufacturing and marketing processes. An extensive
simulation-based interactive game highlights the
challenges faced by the Cybertronics Corporation a
fictional company which is developing products for
commercial applications based on its defense-related
technologies.
(4). Interactive tutorial units: Handbooks and
libraries are accessed to provide necessary background to
understand the technical and managerial issues
associated with specific manufacturing domains.
Modules in all four areas of the project have
been completed and evaluated in courses at Rensselaer
and in corporate training programs. Formal evaluation
methods were developed for this purpose and response
from these evaluations is being used to guide the
continuing development. The Electrical, Computer,
and Systems Engineering Department at Rensselaer has
committed to the use of the ILM materials as a focus
of their current curriculum revision efforts, and will use
materials in large-scale undergraduate courses during the
coming academic year.
The ILM content has been developed using a
modular structure so as to maximize the potential for
multiple use of the same content. For example, each
section of the EE handbook can be used individually in
a specific tutorial module (e.g. the filters entries also
provide introductory material for the EE Filters design
module) or together as a group, such as in the
handbook. This modular approach allows one to pick
and choose from the handbook choices to organize
specific resources for lecture or supplementary course
materials.
2 Multimedia Interactive Simulation
Games
A multimedia environment provides a setting for
creation of simulation experiences structured as
challenging interactive games. Multimedia software
development often entails two conflicting goals. First
the content of the application material must be
developed in a structured and reliable software
environment. In the case of a simulation or game, the
content portion encompasses the data, logic, and
computation of the underlying materials. Second the
d i s p l a y of the media itself and the associated
interactivity requires manipulation of display elements
and support for interaction. From the point of view of
current software engineering practice, the content goal is
best accomplished by well-structured, modular
encapsulated software units. The control flow and
interaction within such a program is constrained to
established structured procedures or object-oriented
protocols in order to sustain reliable development,
maintainability, and reusability of code. On the other
hand, the interactive navigation required for a flexible
user environment often encourages control flow which
creates entertaining but unverifiable paths, leading to
reliability and deadlock problems in the resulting
software. In addition, for the interactive mode it is
often impossible to explore all possible sequences of
execution, and problems can be left undetected.
In the Interactive Learning Modules project, we
are developing interactive simulation games using
multimedia software in the areas of design and
manufacturing. We use multimedia tools to create an
environment which simulates an integrated view of a
product development process. The goal of the ILM
simulation game is to convey to engineers and managers
the experience and princples of strategy and decisionmaking focusing on the interrelationships among
design, manufacturing, and marketing. The ILM
simulation component which integrates an extensive
quantitative simulation model with diverse types of
multimedia materials creates the challenge defined
above.
In the ILM project, the user takes on several
different roles, and is able to interact using a number of
different interactive media. The types of resources
accessible to the user include:
(a). Simulated role environments where the user may
be dynamically interacting, choosing parameters,
making decisions, or defining configurations of objects
and sequences of events on the screen.
(b). Handbook environments where the user is
searching for background information and principles
in order to support the simulated role.
(c). Case study environments in which the user is
watching and listening to presentations of real case
studies realted to the problem being solved. Our current
case studies include animation, video, audio, and 3D
(Quicktime VR) presentations of materials.
In the ILM environment, the user navigates
freely among environments in order to reinforce
principles of multipath and multiview experiential
learning, presenting the user with alternative views of
the same material in order to complement the
understanding of the principles and emphasize the
integrative nature of the material. Recent work on
object-oriented multimedia software has emphasized the
special considerations of the graphical user interface
(GUI), and the development of class structures to
represent multimedia resources. In the ILM
environment, the user is supported by a hierarchy of
display modules and a hierarchy of content modules.
The ILM itself is a hostmodule which supports
navigation to individual modules and allows no private
data members or member functions other than display.
The primary layer of the display hierarchy is a
set of modules which represent the basic functional
units of the project. The four types of modules
currently included are: (a) simulation, (b) handbooks, (c)
case studies, and (d) utilities. The utility modules
incorporate global models and behaviors, and support
standard displays. Within each module is a set of
activities which serve as the computational units of the
modules. Each activity may support a number of
derived user functions which provide display and
interactivity. These display modules and activities
interact with the content modules which represent the
subject matter of simulations, tutorials, and case
studies. Product parts such as electronic components,
or factory machines can be accessed as design topics,
graphic displays, or video displays.
3 Cybertronics: Interactive Design and
Manufacturing Game
The Cybertronics game is designed around the process
flow tasks involved in real-life electronics product
design and development. Cybertronics introduces the
student to the electronics design constraints they must
adhere to within the design space, and the product they
will virtually design and manufacture. The student
begins traveling down a path that includes designing
555 Timer circuit within specified pulse width and
center frequency constraints, ordering components and
casing parts, preparing the manufacturing floor,
manufacturing the board to maximize the yield of
printed wiring boards, choosing a retail price, and
taking it to market. Each task involved in the process
is designed to be used in conjunction with the whole
Cybertronics game, or as a standalone piece in a class
centered around that particular knowledge task. Hence,
we are employing object-oriented design procedures to
allow "plug and play" functionality.
Increased competition for commmercial
products have highlighted the need to provide engineers
and managers with a better understanding of the
interrelationship between design and manufacturing and
the constraints and demands of global markets.
Multimedia tools play an increasingly important role in
both the practice and the education of design and
manufactruing engineers and product managers. Design
visualization is a major application of graphical display
tools and requires not only static, but dynamic and
interactive capabilities. Product specifications may not
lend themselves to straightforward specification of
required manufacturing facilities. The nature of the
manufacturing process itself, and the scheduling of
manufacturing resources has become a key consideration
in the design process.
Design and manufacturing must be concurrent
in order to satisfy jointly defined goals and constraints.
Technical decisions at the design, manufacturing,
marketing, and supplier levels, are coordinated and
depend on the mutual access and interchange of
information about
products and processes.
Understanding the interrelationships among these
activities is essential to effective management, yet this
wider view of interactions, collaborations, and
teamwork has been very difficult to implement and
equally difficult to convey in university or corporate
training educational settings.
In the ILM, we create the Cybertronics
Corporation, a fictional enterprise in which the user
assumes the role of product designer, manufacturing
engineer, marketing expert, and productmanager. In
working through decisions required in product
development, the user addresses the tradeoffs among
product performance, cost, quality, and time-to-market.
The Cybertronics Corporation provides a framework for
experiential learning of design and manufacturing
principles, in the context of case studies of real
corporations.
In the game scenario, the Cybertronics
Corporation is engaged in the development of
electronics products used for spatial localization, much
like a global positioning system (GPS), but with higher
accuracy for local positioning. The Corporation has
basic technologies which it developed for defense
applications, and is working on the development of a
new line of commercial products which incorporate a
similar technology. In Cybertronics, the user takes on
the role of designing, manufacturing, and marketing a
product called the ECLIPSE system for service,
industrial, or consumer markets. A screen from this
Hostmodule of Cybertronics is shown in Figure (1).
The Cybertronics game is structured in a
modular fashion. Inusing this simulation module (M1),
the user has access to the following resources of the
ILM:
MO: Utility Module
M1: Cybertronics 'ECLIPSE'' Product Development
Module
M2: Electronics Handbook
M3: Manufacturing Handbook
M4: Case Studies of Product Development
M5: Case Studies of Manufacturing.
Navigation among these modules is provided
through the host in order to maintain integrity of the
data and state information associated with each phase of
the simulation. In addition, each module has a set of
activities which are accessed through that module:
Activities of Module M1:
A0: Introduction to Cybertronics
A1: Market Research (Product Specification, see Figure
(2))
A2: Functional Design (see Figure (3))
A3: Physical Design
A4: Parts Ordering
A5: Manufacturing Layout and Planning
A6: Manufacturing Control
A7: Market and Sales (Trade Show).
Each activity may, in turn, have several views
available. For example, the electronic product
functional design task might include two activities and
associated views:
A2: Functional Design of Electronics
V0: Electronic circuit schematic diagram
V1: Oscilloscope display of test signals
A3:
V0:
V1:
V2:
Physical Design of Electronics
Graphics of individual parts
'Breadboard' layout graphics
Final assembled board in 3D view graphics.
From the Functional Design module, a
question about the princples of the 555 Time electronics
can be pursued directly to the Electronics Handbook.
Similarly, the electronics manufacturing
module has several alternative activities and views.
For example:
M1: Cybertronics 'Eclipse' product development
module
A1: Wave solder process
V0: Video of wave solder machine
V1: Animation of wave solder principles
V2: Equations of heat transfer versus board speed.
A question about the principles of wave solder
can be followed to the Case Studies module,with access
to either video or graphics display of wave solder
processes. A sample screen from A4: Part Ordering is
shown in Figure (4), and a sample viewer screen for A5:
Manufacturing Layout is shown in Figure (5). This
interface allows the user to designate the number and
types of solder machines to be used in the factory. This
choice is entered to the module and immediately
influences the production throughput, the manufacturing
costs, and the product reliability by propagation
through the data structures. A sample tutorial screen
describin basic manufacturing scheduling concepts is
shown in Figure (6).
4
Implementation
The Interactive Learning Modules Cybertronics
simulation game has had a major impact on the
Electrical Engineering (EE) and Computer and Systems
Engineering (CSE) Curricula at Rensselaer. The ILM
project is providing the means by which we are
transforming our curriculua into programs that are more
exciting, challenging and rewarding for both students
and faculty, and which can be delivered in a more costeffective manner. The EE and CSE programs are
undergoing systemic change as part of a campus-wide
curriculum restructuring activity at Rensselaer which, in
turn, has resulted from a major Strategic Initiative in
Interactive Learning that is now completing its sixth
year. The goals of the curriculum restructuring efforts
are to reduce the number of individual courses that a
student takes in any given semester, increase the level
of student choice in each curriculum, significantly
increase the level of interactivity (student-student,
student-faculty) In our courses, and lower the
fundamental educational delivery costs. The key
elements in these changes are the use of multimediabased educational tutorials and the new Studio format
for educational delivery that has been pioneered at
Rensselaer. The ILM project is directly providing these
tutorials in electronics-related areas and is setting the
standards by which these materials will be developed in
many other areas.
The new EE and CSE curricula will feature all
introductory courses being delivered in a highly
interactive Studio format in which fundamental concepts
and professional practice skills are learned in an
integrated manner. The Studio format will replace the
traditional "theory courses plus separate laboratory"
approach that has been in use in engineering education
for several decades. A11 EE and CSE majors (200 per
year) will be required to take 3 4-credit "ECSE Core"
courses (Circuit Analysis, Signals and Systems and
Computer Components and Operation). These core
courses will be followed by 5 additional 4-credit
"gateway" courses (Analog Electronics, Digital
Electronics, Fields and Waves, Microelectronics
Technology, Computer Architecture, Networks and
Operating Systems) over which the student will exercise
a fair amount of choice and each of which will also are
delivered in the Studio format.
This commitment to the Studio format for all
large-enrollment, introductory courses has been made
possible by the success to date of the ILM project.
ECSE faculty have used the Cybertornics game and
ILM tutorials such as the 555 Timer and the EE
Handbook, and those currently under development on
Filters, Operational Amplifiers, and Transistor
Amplifiers. The ILM results have allowed the faculty
to clearly see how these materials can be used to make
our courses both challenging and motivational, and how
they can be used to directly link fundamental concepts
with their application. ILM materials will be used in
the new Circuit Analysis course, the new Signals and
Systems course and the new Analog Electronics course.
The ILM development methodology and "look and feel"
will be used for the development of modules in all other
courses slated for the Studio format. Implementation of
the use of ILM materials began in the Spring 1996
semester when the 555 Timer Module was used in a
freshman-level Introduction to Engineering Electronics
course and a junior-level Introduction to Electronic
Devices and Circuits course. Students in the juniorlevel course also provided, "user feedback" on the ILM
multimedia game, Cybertronics. A pilot version of the
new Analog Electronics course will begin during the
Fall 1996 semester using a newly-created
Circuit/Electronics Studio facility that ECSE has
funded from other sources. Students in this facility use
multimedia computers which have GPIB interfaces to
oscilloscopes, function generators, multimeters, and
power supplies. They will also have a full range of
protyping materials. All ILM modules will be available
in the facility using Netscape as the user interface, and
will also be available to students during non-class hours
via the campus network. A pilot version of the new
Circuit Analysis course will begin in the Spring 1997
semester using the same facility. The first pilot of the
new Signals and Systems course is planned for the Fall
1997 semester, using existing computer classroom
facilities on the Rensselaer campus. The other courses
will be phased in as development proceeds and
additional facilities are created.
Prototype versions of the ILM have also been
shown to representatives from many different industrial
companies including ATT, Rockwell, GM Hughes,
GTE, Microsoft, Northern Telecom, GE, IBM, and
Raytheon. These representatives have included both
technical and management audiences. The materials
have been used in industrial short courses, and will be
incorporated into a course on Product Development
being given by the School of Management at
Rensselaer.
The module on scheduling of
manufacturing facilities has been utilized and evaluated
in the Spring, 1996, semester in a course on
manufacturing performance analysis for managers and
industrial engineers.
5
Evaluation
In the Interactive Learning Modules, we have focused
on testing and deploying the multimedia resources
developed in undergraduate Electrical Engineering
courses, graduate-level Scheduling courses, and
corporate short-courses on the ATT and Boeing
campuses. Controlled testing sessions on the
Cybertronics alpha version 1.0 were also conducted on
an undergraduate population in February and May,
1996. These diverse testing situations have yielded key
information on the relative success of the multimedia
modules created to date, and have led to more succinct
definition of the knowledge engineering process, design
for interaction, software engineering implementation,
and refining measurement and testing procedures
themselves.
The 555 Timer was the first electronics design
and analysis module created in the ILM. This module
was deployed throughout a hands-on first-year
laboratory course at Rensselaer called Electronics
Design, an innovative course designed to allow the
students hands-on learning experience without extensive
lecture times. The students were eventually expected to
accomplish a design task utilizing task, and their
impressions of the ILM 555 Timer program as an
effective learning tool ( see Table A, 555 Timer
Questionnaire ). Most importantly, the statistics
indicated that the multimedia 555 Timer has spurred
students to think about how circuit functions ( Q6 )
rather than treating it as a black box, and that the
students would now like to learn more about the 555
Timer circuitry having had some introduction to its
function through the multimedia 555 timer program.
Three out of four questions show students positive
attitude towards the 555 Timer. Therefore, the
questionnaires revealed that the average mean felt that
the multimedia 555 Timer program was a helpful
educational aid. The attitudinal mean also correlated
with the 32 out of 66 students who showed an
exceptional understanding of the internal functioning of
the 555 Timer as revealed in short answer questions on
their laboratory reports.
The ILM generated a complete version of the
Cybertronics Design and Manufacturing game
simulation in February, 1996. In order to test the
pedagogical effectiveness of the game in teaching
students about specific electronics design issues
encountered in commercial product development, as
well as about the manufacturing of electronics, we
designed a pre and post test questionnaire and held two
testing events with two populations of undergraduate
students this spring. The questionnaires had one set of
10 knowledge questions on the subject of electronics
design, the manufacturing of electronics, and marketing
of new products. Both the pre and post exams
contained a duplicate of the set of 10 questions. Our
hypothesis was that an improvement in the students
scores from the pretest to the posttest indicated that the
Cybertronics game was responsible for that learning.
The testing environment was controlled through a
minimal time delay between pre and post exams of 1.5
hours that the students spent playing the game. No
books or notes were allowed during the exam
administration and the students were seated apart from
each other to eliminate communication. Similar to a
classroom situation, numerous ILM developers were
available to talk to the students, take notes on features
that required debugging, and troubleshoot computer
problems during the actual playing of the game.
Statistics indicated that the students scores did
appreciate between the pre and post exams, indicating
that the game itself was the tool they used to learn
knowledge about a design and manufacturing
environment. More exciting than the raw statistics were
the students reactions to the game. In response to did
you learn about electronics students wrote, There is
more involved in the design of a circuit than making it
work, It helped me learn about the rules of the resistors
and caps in a circuit, Interactions of all elements in a
product make a big difference in cost/performance
tradeoffs. All students agreed they learned something
they didn't prior to playing, and they ALL wanted to
play again. Similarly, they provided the development
team with debugging information and invaluable
suggestions from the students perspective about what
they would like to see improved and what information
they would like added.
Out of the first testing day, the ILM worked
for two months to fix bugs in the software, incorporate
more information and feedback to the user at critical
points in the decision path, as well as refine the
questionnaire testing instrument itself. From a software
design perspective, the second testing date went
smoothly with no software crashes occurring due to
improper software design. The students posttest scores
again improved over the pretest, leading us to believe
that the Cybertronics game is an effective learning tool
in the areas of electronics design and manufacturing.
6
Conclusions
Cybertronics has been designed, tested and evaluated to
incorporate different levels of ability in each of the
marketing, electronics design, and manufacturing
knowledge areas to allow people to experience the
whole development process while specializing in a
particular skill. In addition, we are anticipating that the
Cybertronics game will be distributed over the WorldWideWeb, played by students and professionals in
refresher courses from a distance during a real-time,
virtual classroom space. Students will access
Cybertronics and all other ILM material via Netscape
and a network connection. Configuring all media and
logic within a structured framework also will allow us
to update the game more frequently without disturbing
the software design architecture, as well as allowing a
professor to add material specifically for a class s/he
will be teaching. Cybertronics then becomes a part of a
flexible software structure that can be modified by
instructors and students adding to the knowledge
database. A student playing the Cybertronics game to
access the Electronics curriculum on Filters, the
Electrical Engineering Handbook, and the Marketing
Management of Design multimedia piece without ever
discontinuing the Cybertronics game. The student's
results will be saved to the database dynamically while
they access other ILM and network resources in order to
play the game more effectively.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The ILM Project is funded under NSF Grant No. EEC9416305 from the National Science Foundation as a
Manufacturing Education and Training Project of the
Technology Reinvestment Program. A large number of
students and staff have particpated in the
implementation of these materials. George Matey,
Albert Wong, Bill Brubaker, and Eric Moon deserve
particular thanks.
Figure 1: Introductory Navigation Screen for Cybertronics
Figure 2: Design Specification for Cybertrons Product
Figure 3: Interactive Electronic Circuit Design Screen
Figure 4: Parts Order Form for Cybertronics
Figure 5: Manufacturing Assembly Plant Layout
Figure 6: Scheduling Concepts for the Manufacturing Plant