Abstract
Students engaged in systems engineering education typically lack experience and understanding of the multidisciplinary complexity of systems engineering projects. Consequently, students struggle to understand the value, rationale, and usefulness of established systems engineering methods, often perceiving them as banal or trivial. The paper presents a learning activity based on a three-stage reverse engineering role-play developed to increase students’ awareness of the importance of correctly using systems engineering methods. The activity was developed and integrated in the Systems Engineering course given at Blekinge Institute of Technology. Its effectiveness was analyzed through semistructured self-reflection reports along with two editions of the course. The results showed the development of students’ understanding of how to use systems engineering methods. In particular, the students realized the need to deliver detailed and easy-to-read models to the decision makers. This result was in line with the achievement of some of the intended learning outcomes of the course.
Highlights
The evolution of humanity has always been characterized by a continuous attempt to improve the quality of life and to create better living conditions
Eleven students (35% of the total) raised the necessity for the new models to be more readable than the previous ones, adding pictures to facilitate the communication (8 students). In light of such data, it is possible to state that the students developed a critical perspective toward their own work, reflecting on the necessity to use systems engineering (SE) methods in a way that allows easier knowledge and information communication at different functional levels and for different uses. This is shown by the shared understanding that the level of detail of the models that the teams delivered during stage 1 did not reflect the level of detail that was later needed by the other teams when acting as product innovators and decision makers
Theraised evolving needs offor society and industry changed the way in which engineering the necessity the new models to behave moreconstantly readable than the previous ones, adding education is performed
Summary
The evolution of humanity has always been characterized by a continuous attempt to improve the quality of life and to create better living conditions. The search for new ways of satisfying fundamental needs has often led to the engineering of complex systems that, in order to be successful, needed to be socially acceptable and provide value. The term systems engineering (SE) is commonly used to refer to the engineering effort of satisfying articulated sets of needs from different stakeholders, with the intent of developing solutions providing value to an overarching system [1]. The concept of SE was coined in response to the need to develop increasingly complex systems in the aerospace industry [2]. While the need for such competences is increasingly recognized in industry and research, those are still poorly addressed from a pedagogical perspective for what concerns the education of new systems engineers. As highlighted by the International Council of Systems Engineering, current SE programs focus on practice, with little emphasis on underlying theory, especially for what concerns human and social sciences [1]
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