Together, student and 'consultant' visit a 'virtual company', following the progress of a new product from initial recognition of a need to sales of the first production batch. Initially, students are shown a sequential approach to the engineering design process, together with examples of iteration. The program encourages student's interaction, requiring both an evaluation of the scenarios presented and a search for information. By this means, and guided by the 'consultant', students partake in the introduction of a cultural change within the virtual company involving the introduction of the horizontal communications channels previously discussed in this paper. In this way, students discover how the engineering design process traditionally operates within an organisational environment and how the philosophy of concurrent engineering may bring about improvements.
ICE adopts a 'comic book' visual style with animated 'talking' characters.
It is expected that ICE will mainly be used on systems that do not have a facility for sound. In this case, speech balloons are used to convey textural information. Figures 1-3 show representative program screens. Throughout, the programs' characters interact with students providing formative guidance regulated by the students own responses and progress. Additional relevant information is provided by means of hypermedia links to on screen objects.