Sights Inside the Virtual Engineering Education - Web-Based Engineering Education: Critical Design and Effective Tools - page 161

Vadillo 2009). This paper discusses an alterna-
tive to the traditional approach which shifts the
instructional focus from specific computer ap-
plications to more sophisticated uses of general
purpose software. In particular, educational uses
of purpose-oriented small software which can
be implemented in multi purpose software are
exampled as an introduction to this approach. In
another vision, purpose-oriented small software
can be designed as a cost-effective approach to
provide practical experience to undergraduate
students. The concept which is called ' Virtual
Laboratory' and is being widely developed in
engineering schools and educational programs
(Gervasi 2004; Ramasundaram 2005; Kukreti
2008; Tan 2008; Vadillo 2009).
The software and approaches described here
have been presented to graduate and undergradu-
ate engineering education majors in a continuing
education course in universities or factories.

involving different science fields and may need
weeks or months of work if they would have
been done by hands.
Along with the significant changes in design-
ing and calculating methods, occurred through the
application of electronic devices like calculating
machines as a simple example, but mostly the
computers, the methods of teaching the design and
modeling techniques have changed remarkably.
However comparing to all the present branches
of science and technology, the engineering and
engineering education have evolved more and
have progressed fabulously. Nowadays the use of
computer-aided design software (CAD) or finite
element systems (FEA) have become de facto a
standard and the essential topics in engineering
courses, both at school and university levels.
In the next step, further improvements in the
field of computer languages has made the use of
custom-made software more widely possible, and
has empowered the engineers to solve different
requirements of the industries.
Professional programming languages like
Python™ or Visual Basic® have been developed
with a reasonably user friendly, easy learning
curve and practical performances, providing lower
investment costs for users. On the other hand to
confront with more complicated calculations
middle-level languages like C++ or High-level
languages like FORTRAN represent a fairly better
performance in a more admissible time. Further-
more, concerning to the fact that the software may
be used in different operating systems and to aid
the students to use them in laboratory or at home
then a cross-platform programming approach
consisting of languages, tools, libraries, etc. that
let the programmer to port easily the code from
one operating system to another one can be more
favorable.
However, the field of education is usually
concerned about the understanding of concepts
as well as how to speed-up the learning process,
where the ease of knowledge transfer from the
teacher to the students is the key issue.

EngInEErIng EducAtIon
IS EvoLvIng

Since the first years of its emergence in mid
20 th century (1940-1945), the computers have
been welcomed and started to be employed by
governments, companies, factories and moreover
in education. By this new invention of human
being the computations needed the handling of
big amount of data and calculations have been
“translated” in computer language and little by
little have been automatized and implemented
by this powerful contrivance. It changed the
approach to design radically and convinced the
engineers, mathematicians, economists, industri-
alists all over the world to employ it as a potent
tool in their activities. Since that time we have
been witnessing significant jumps in the science
of computing and design. Nowadays, thanks to
the enormous power of today's computers re-
spect to what was available just few years ago,
we are able to solve complex, multifarious tasks