Reverse Engineering in the Teaching of Technical Disciplines

The success of students after graduating from university does not depend only on the knowledge which they have acquired during their studies. For students of technical fields, the important factors are experience with the application of their knowledge and creativity. The level of this ability divides good engineers from bad engineers. Unfortunately, studies of technical specializations at university are more focused on theoretical knowledge. This leads to some bizarre situations. In some cases, college graduates are overshadowed during the job interview by graduates from secondary schools. The first reason is the bad situation on the labour market. The second reason is the practical experience that graduates from secondary schools have acquired over their five years of practical studies, compared with studies at university. For this reason, we focused on how to provide practical knowledge to students of technical fields at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the University of West Bohemia. The first step was to create e-learning and Project-Based Learning materials that have already been described and published in other articles and publications. The second step presented here is a method called Reverse Engineering-Based Learning. This method is based on a technical process that is derived from practice. The nature of this process is focused on creating technical documentation from an existing product for further processing. The principle of applying this method in teaching is simple, inexpensive and effective. In principle, students are familiarized with a mechanism and a part of the mechanism that they will examine and modify; they get an idea of the importance of the links between the parts of the mechanical structure and the manufacturing process; and they also must come up with new ways of production resulting from the modification of the selected parameters. In the process of working on the task, students are forced to use the theoretical knowledge which was presented during lectures and seminars, and also to obtain additional knowledge from technical publications, professors, engineers from industry, the Internet, etc. The final step is the possibility to manufacture the designed components within our department.