WIP: Impact of Role-Playing Simulation for a Design for Manufacturing Course.

Role-playing has been used in psychology, history, nursing, language instruction, and other areas to increase student engagement and improve learning outcomes. Here it is utilized for an injection molding project in four week-long online exercises in a quarter-long Design for Manufacturing course. The course covers manufacturing basics, comparative analysis of processes, and manufacturing fitness for design. For the simulation, groups are formed into groups representing assembly, customer satisfaction, marketing, and purchasing to develop design requirements for an imaginary customer. Teams are then formed with representatives of each group to develop new, combined design requirements and use them to create a design to present to their "customer." All communication between the groups and teams were in an online discussion forum and coded for their breadth and depth with respect to the course learning objectives. An anonymous summative survey was used to assess the student response to the activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]