Facilitating learning by failure through a pedagogical model-based tool for bioprocesses

Facing uncertain situations and deciding a course of action is an opportunity to help students understand the practical implications of the theoretical knowledge and prepares them for the future challenges as engineers. However, allowing “failures and making wrong decisions” is becoming more and more challenging in industry due to safety and economic reasons and must be essentially allowed in academia.

However, in academia it is also very challenging due to limitations in resources and safety concerns. Meanwhile, simulators are generally valuable tools for education that allow an intuitive learning based on action and offer the students an autonomy in their decision-making process. In spite of these advantages, the simulators commonly used in engineering education are meant for commercial purposes and incorporate a rigorous description of the process.

Therefore, they are not inherently ready to be deployed in an educational program. This work presents a model-based pedagogical simulation tool, FermProc, having a clear objective for use in bio-manufacturing education. The in FermProc implemented computer-aided framework devises an active learning design based on the creation and analysis of different realistic and unrealistic scenarios such that students can safely confront common operational problems.

Therefore, this model-based tool is intended to provide the users with the experience and the confidence to face and resolve uncomfortable situations encountered while operating a bioprocess.