A cyber environment for engineering cyber education

Abstract

Cyberenvironment has emerged as a next generation cyberinfrastructure to support 21st century scientific research and education. In this paper, we introduce an on-going cyberenvironment project named e-AIRS, an abbreviation of 'e-Science Aerospace Integrated Research System'. e-AIRS is a cyberinfrastructure-based portal system, and integrates a set of tools and services to support the aerodynamics engineering processes as a first step toward building a cyberenvironment for engineering cyber education. The system helps students to understand the full simulation process of aerodynamics engineering. Moreover, the system can be widely applied to other engineering fields too, such as ships, civil engineering, and etc. We conducted a survey of about 230 students about 5 topics at 7 classes of five universities. According to the survey, 94 percent said the system helped to understand the whole process of CFD, and more than 80 percent of the students said e-AIRS environment provided a good functionality, convenience, and user interface. © 2008 IEEE.