Sights Inside the Virtual Engineering Education - Web-Based Engineering Education: Critical Design and Effective Tools - page 166

Testing of strange combinations of the input
variables makes the lessons more interesting to the
students and more over it also introduces concepts
like the minimum number of teeth. Usually this
is introduced as the result of an equation aimed
to obtain geometry of the gear in order to avoid
the teeth interference.
Through the visual approach of such software
the student can also easily realize how the shape
of teeth is changing from a high number of teeth
to the low number of teeth, as shown in Figure 5;
where we have just 5 teeth (meanwhile the clas-
sical minimum number of teeth is around 17 for
a pressure angle of 20 degrees).
The use of a well-designed user interface and a
real-time changing of the visual results may help

students to “play” with the inputs and to see the
result of their combinations directly.
For example the use of a slide may easily teach
the influence of a parameter to a student watching
directly the changing of the geometry from a very
low value to a very high value of that parameter.
The authors believe that an effective educa-
tional approach is not just the use of one particular
tool or software even if it is very powerful, but
make the students used to system of tools as the best
choice. This may be sometimes time consuming
and they may require a level of knowledge which
is not easily accessible in every school or factory.
However the use of different general purpose
software, smartly connected to each other, is a
fast and flexible technique which can be adapted

Figure 5. An example of 5 teeth gear designed by Gear-Cut