CAL Student Coaching Environment and Virtual Reality in Mechanical Engineering

This work presents an extension of our study on multimedia patterns of interactions and development of computer aided-learning (CAL) engineering tools. We used four approaches in implementing the CAL tools for user visualization that is, that is, 2-D, 3-D, coach environment and desktop virtual reality. The designed CAL tools have been enhanced to enable the integration and investigation of visualization in various engineering problems for undergraduates with particular weak learners. Each problem was designed using different authoring tool. More significantly, we have enhanced some of the CAL tools to the degree where the user can interact and be coached independently. This dramatically increases the quality of the tools i.e. patterns of interactions, 2-D and 3-D views of synthetic models. In general the result shows that the CAL tools could alleviate the user interacting and instill a sense of learning and the user understand the engineering problem better.