Learning support software – teaching process for planning and analysis of experiments

Abstract: Engineering presents as one of its characteristics, the need of investigating systems, in order to obtain the maximum results from these. Design of Experiment is a method that can support this need, but the intrinsic complexity of the method creates barriers to its understanding, and consequently on its use, with statistics being considered one of the most significant agents, therefore it is necessary to use more efficient approaches for teaching this method. The traditional teaching approaches are not enough to favor learning of the essence from Design of Experiment, since its focus is almost entirely on statistics or, when using technological resources, the tool becomes an actor due to the fact of being a complex analysis software, and suitable for use by experts. So, the purpose of this thesis is to propose a software with teaching characteristics, capable of filling this gap, which was called “The Cake”, a metaphor that refers to the total variability from an experiment, and whose portions are taken by the controllable and uncontrollable effects. Thus, this software was developed with the purpose of providing friendly interfaces, which are similar to text books, to facilitate its use and provide interaction with the user, apart from presenting the analyses in a gradual way.

工程学科的典型特征之一，是需对各类系统开展研究以实现其最大效能。实验设计（Design of Experiment）是可满足这一需求的方法，但该方法固有的复杂性构成了理解与应用的障碍，其中统计学相关内容被认为是核心阻碍因素之一，因此亟需更高效的教学路径来推广该方法。传统教学模式难以让学习者掌握实验设计的核心要义：要么教学内容完全聚焦于统计学知识，要么在借助技术工具时，由于工具本身是面向专业人士的复杂分析软件，反而成为学习壁垒。有鉴于此，本论文旨在开发一款具备教学属性的软件以填补这一空白，该软件被命名为‘蛋糕（The Cake）’——其隐喻原型为实验的总变异量，各部分分别对应可控效应与不可控效应。因此，本软件的开发目标是打造类似教科书风格的友好交互界面，既便于用户操作与交互，同时以循序渐进的方式呈现分析过程。