Any questions left? - How FHWS students develop answers to everyday, current questions
Students from the faculties of Mechanical Engineering and Business and Engineering in project teams on a total of twelve tasks, which were then evaluated by a professorial jury. The example shows the development of a mobile greenbox as background in the use of video conferencing.The challenge for the students is highly topical: Many people work COVID-19 from home. Many do not have an adequate study room that deserves the name "home office" and guarantees a serious appearance. Accordingly, during online meetings videoconference participants look into the living rooms of colleagues, they look unintentionally into open wardrobes or witness live how children play noisily in the background. Many tools for online meetings offer the possibility of fading in virtual backgrounds. But this only works if the participants are sitting in front of a neutral, ideally green background. Three teams with students from the faculties of Mechanical Engineering and Business and Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt set themselves the task of finding a remedy with a mobile, so-called green box.The German and international teams, which all presented their results of the twelve projects in English, came up with different approaches to solve the problem. At first - as was later the case in engineering work in companies - the teams set up professional project and time management so that nothing stood in the way of the fixed final presentation date with a jury of professors.The second step was a detailed analysis of the market. Existing suppliers of green boxes were identified, the advantages and disadvantages of the products as well as the prices were compared and recorded in an overview. With this knowledge and the original formulation of the supervising professor, the task could now be recorded in measurable requirements. Subsequently, in a so-called morphological box, the students defined which product features were decisive for their own concept and how they could implement them - always keeping costs in mind.In these learning-by-doing processes, students become familiar with all the processes involved in an engineering job in concrete applications - this includes time and project management, the selection and application of various scientific modules and methods, articulation in a foreign language, scientific due diligence, and the use of various presentation channels via posters, film clips, PowerPoint presentations and, currently, the use of online meetings. And it doesn't matter what the task is - whether it's looking for a load indicator for car trailers, tinkering with how to make a "mykellerpaketpackstation" or how to turn a "normal bicycle" into a cargo bicycle.
