Interactive training material about additive manufacturing technologies

Abstract

The Engineering education is living a change driven by the new opportunities and technologies that appear in the Industry 4.0 context. One of them are the Additive Manufacturing Technologies. Nowadays, these technologies are mainly applied in the preliminary design and prototyping phases, around 80% of the usage cases belong to this stage of the product development process. However, utilization is increasing because companies are becoming more aware of Additive Manufacturing potential. In fact, research shows 72% of industrial companies will invest or educate for specialized use of additive technologies. On the one hand, professionals have created communities to learn about these technologies, practice and share their knowledge. Further, it is necessary to include this knowledge in Engineering degrees. Due to this, the educational innovation group Ingeniería de Fabricación of University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria has developed an interactive learning material about Additive Manufacturing technologies. This material has been developed especially for students of Manufacturing Process, but it can be used to coordinate other subjects of the engineering degrees, given the fact that it is a transversal knowledge for all engineering profiles. Moreover, it has focus on helping the teacher labour and students self-learning (Flipped Classroom).