A web-based E-learning courseware for the module ME1101, Engineering Visualization and Modeling, has been developed to complement the normal lectures, practical work and tutorials at the National University of Singapore (NUS). This courseware includes the lecture notes, the solutions and worked examples in animated format, related videos to emphasize the finer details of manual drawing concepts and online quizzes to enable students to learn better. A number of information technology (IT) tools are being used in the courseware development. The Integrated Virtual Learning Environment (IVLE), developed in-house by the Centre for Instructional Technology (CIT) at NUS, has also played a large role in assisting the instructor and tutors for the module to better manage the course. The courseware developed is especially useful to students from other faculties who do not have any technical knowledge.

Today, the time-to-market for plastic products is becoming shorter, thus the lead time available for making the injection mould is decreasing. There is potential for timesaving in the mould design stage because a design process that is repeatable for every mould design can be standardised. This paper presents a methodology for designing the cavity layout for plastic injection moulds by controlling the geometrical parameters using a standardisation template. The standardisation template for the cavity layout design consists of the configurations for the possible layouts. Each configuration of the layout design has its own layout design table of all the geometrical parameters. This standardisation template is pre-defined at the layout design level of the mould assembly design. This ensures that the required configuration can be loaded into the mould assembly design very quickly, without the need to redesign the layout. This makes it useful in technical discussions between the product designers and mould designers prior to the manufacture of the mould. Changes can be made to the 3D cavity layout design immediately during the discussions, thus saving time and avoiding miscommunication. This standardisation template for the cavity layout design can be customised easily for each mould making company to their own standards.

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The preliminary work of any final plastic injection mould design is to provide an initial design of the mould assembly for product designers (customers) prior to receiving the final product CAD data. Traditionally and even up till now, this initial design is always created using 2D CAD packages. The information used for the initial design is based on the technical discussion checklist, in which most mould makers have their own standards. This checklist is also being used as a quotation. This paper presents a methodology of providing the initial design in 3D solid modelling based on the technical discussion checklist, which takes the role of the overall standard template. Information from databases is extracted and coupled with the basic information from customer, these information are input into the technical discussion checklist. Rules and heuristics are also used to assist the initial mould design. A case study is also presented to illustrate the use of the standard template and to demonstrate its real application.

Code clones are similar program structures recurring in software systems. Clone detectors produce much information and a challenge is to identify useful clones depending on the goals of clone analysis. To do so, further abstraction, filtering and visualization of cloning information, with the involvement of a human expert, is required. In this paper, we describe a technique for filtering and visualization of cloning information generated by Clone Miner, a clone detection tool presented in our earlier work. Unique benefit and contribution of our approach is that a human expert can define a wide range of filters to extract abstract views of the cloning data using a clone-query system to suit specific needs of clone analysis. We then produce standardized graphical presentations of those views for various types of clone queries. We implemented the technique into an Eclipse plug-in called Clone Visualizer. Clone Visualizer works closely with Clone Miner which not only finds similar code fragments (simple clones) but also finds higher-level abstractions of the cloning information. Our method is the first attempt to address filtering and visualization of those higher level cloning abstractions. We illustrate application of our technique with examples from a clone analysis project with Clone Miner and Clone Visualizer.978-1-4244-2614-0/08/$25.00