Abstract—In this study, we have demonstrated a possible way
to inspire students without engineering background to design
amphibious vehicles of the future world. Our virtual classroom
is facilitated with an open-source 3D world simulator, i.e.,
OpenSim, on a private computing cloud. We adopted the
concept of the creative thinking spiral to help the students design
their amphibious cars or boats following the principles of
bionics engineering and fluid dynamics. In the stages of imagine
and creation, students have to carefully balance the
contributions from various aspects including the shape of the
vehicles, the hydrodynamic forces on the water and on the land
and the power consumption for amphibious maneuvering.
Besides that, due to their limit skills of 3D modeling, we
encourage the students to explain their design philosophies in
details on a Facebook group. The peer comments received from
the participants may lead to fresh idea of design and can result
constructive reflections in the next cycle of the creative thinking
spiral.
Index Terms—Amphibious vehicle, virtual reality, creative
thinking spiral.
Hung-Cheng Chen is with the Faculty of Center of General Education, Yu
Da University of Science and Technology, Miao-Li, Taiwan (e-mail:
hungcheng@gmail.com).
Cite: Hung-Cheng Chen, "On the Creative Design of Amphibious Vehicles in a 3D Virtual Classroom Using OpenSim," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 7, no. 7, pp. 508-513, 2017.