Simulation gaming educates engineers
Overall, COSIGA was developed to engender a dynamic multimedia platform that would enhance engineering within a personal and global emphasis. The developers wanted to design a domain that would be as challenging and thriving as real-word engineering is, fully stocked with real business-processes environments, key principles and practices of the industry as well as the complexities involved in concurrent engineering such as cooperation, parallelism, goal sharing, customer focus and continuous process improvement. Nor did the developers concepts stop with this. Their focus was primarily educational, and as such they wanted COSIGA easily adaptable to current curricula but versatile enough to be embedded into curricula of various cultural backgrounds and heritages. In order to produce this enterprise, serious consideration was given to the development of the model, and a wide range of criteria were evaluated to best produce the final pedagogical-gaming experience. The engineering simulation model gave solemn consideration to features such as architecture that would have a broad distribution capacity by avoiding expensive hardware or software to run the platform on. It also wanted to ensure comprehensive single or multi-player scenarios and fast-response game time as well as the chance to include asynchronous gaming over a broadband communication system protocols such as TCP/IP and ISDN. The end result is a state-of-the-art technology that combines education with simulated work reality that will culminate in students coming to the work-force as well rounded, competitive and integrated members of the engineering world, well in-tune with the demands and rigors expected of them.
