TWO SEMESTER AGILE SYSTEMS ENGINEERING DESIGN COURSE: INVESTIGATION AND EXPLORATION OF 'IMMERSIVE' TRAINING TECHNOLOGIES

摘要

The teaching of systems engineering is a daunting task that involves the development of curriculum capable of teaching students the systems engineering process, the design aspects of engineering, and the interdisciplinary knowledge of a variety of fields. Design is widely considered to be the central or the major distinguishing activity of engineering. Design can be considered as the center of system engineering, in which engineers employ an interdisciplinary approach to design effective solutions to meet social needs. However, systems engineering requires that traditional academic boundaries be crossed and intertwined with other fields of engineering as well as business, socio-political, and other disciplines that clearly interacts with or are directly affected by the system under consideration. Systems engineering requires different design thinking, as it requires in depth knowledge often beyond the traditional engineering classification boundaries. For example, an electrical engineer must also in many cases have knowledge of software engineering, or safety engineering when designing a cell phone circuit. In Dym et al., it is proposed that there are many informative approaches to characterizing design thinking, which attribute and highlight the skills often associated with good designers, namely, the ability to: a. Tolerate ambiguity that shows up in viewing design as inquiry or as an iterative loop of divergent-convergent thinking; b. Maintain sight of the big picture by including systems thinking and systems design; c. Handle uncertainty; d. Make decisions; e. Think as part of a team in a social process; f. Think and communicate in several languages of design.