Integration of Simulation into Product Development at Austrian Secondary and Tertiary Technical Education

Product development today is driven to a large extent by virtual methods and can therefore be assigned to the field of virtual engineering. Various software systems are available on the market, on the one hand with embedded CAD systems and on the other hand with stand-alone systems. A major challenge in secondary and tertiary education is to combine virtual engineering methods with general engineering knowledge. This results in the quality issue of not teaching how to use the software, but rather teaching the generally applicable knowledge behind the software solutions - i.e. the methods themselves must be taught. At Austrian HTLs (secondary vocational schools) there is a strong focus on CAD during five classes. In recent years, some aspects of virtual engineering have been taken up to prepare students well for working life. It is widely recognized that this needs to be strengthened. The paper will present the current state-of-the-art and show possible scenarios how to improve the current state. At Graz University of Technology (tertiary level) there is the situation that students have very different prior knowledge at the beginning of their studies (mainly mechanical engineering), as (only) some of them come from HTLs. To counteract this and to better adapt the teaching to the personal skills of the students, an e-learning approach for CAD and CAE education was introduced in 2012. A lot of experience and feedback has been gathered to continuously improve the teaching approach. The article shows this approach and outlines future perspectives.