International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

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.