New simulation course well received

New simulation course well received

To stay competitive we continually re-evaluate and improve our educational offerings. Among other things, that means improving existing as well as developing new courses. In recent years several new courses have been launched on master level as direct offspring’s of the research project “Model Driven Development and Decision Support”, the main vehicle of research at PDRL. The course Simulation-Driven Design is an example of such a course.

The simulation-driven design course was officially launched 2017 but a “dry run” was conducted already in 2016. The course features a completely new curricula combining design optimization with methods for efficient design space exploration and simulation process automation.

-I’d say that the curriculum is novel considering the mix of topics, says course responsible Dr Johan Wall. My aim with the course is to expand the students “toolboxes” by adding new tools, methods and ideas. This course is given for our final year engineering students. Soon after that they take this course they leave us to meet new challenges, many of them end up within product development organizations. My hope is that they will become change makers, advocating the value of simulation as a tool for design exploration, retiring the role of simulation as mainly a verification tool.

As part of the quality work at BTH students participate in course evaluations on a regular basis. The simulation driven design course has been very well received by the students and have attained very good assessments in these course evaluations. Some highlights from the part of the evaluation where the students are able provide comments in free text:

“The quality of the content and lectures were impressive.”

“This is the course that I enjoyed the most during my 5 years at BTH”

The last time the course was given in the autumn of 2018 it almost received a perfect score overall. The course was given a 3.9 average of the maximum 4.0. As can be seen in the figure below, the course has received high scores since the introduction.

Average score on core questions 2016-2018.

-I’m grateful that the students enjoy and can see the value of the course, says Dr Wall. This is a tough course, to succeed students need to put in the hours, there are no shortcuts. It is not uncommon that such demands turn out to be costly when it comes to course evaluations. I’m proud of the students commitment. It’s impossible to deliver a good course without it.

For more information regarding the Simulation-Driven Design course, have a look at links provided below or contact course responsible Dr Johan Wall.

Categories: Education