Teaching Warehousing Concepts through Interactive Animations and 3-D Models

Abstract

Abstract A significant challenge in teaching warehousing and facility logistics is conveying the important managerial and operational concepts to students effectively. These concepts always involve the presence and interactions of real-world objects such as facilities, vehicles, materials, storage and retrieval equipment, and most importantly humans. Meanwhile, knowledge in the mentioned fields does not only consist of concepts and principles but also include algorithms that solve a variety of problems encountered in practice. Trying to communicate this body of knowledge in words with the help of photos and drawings frequently proves insufficient. In teaching his warehousing courses the author has realized that a set of educational media composed of interactive animations and virtual threedimensional (3-D) models indeed facilitates the challenges described earlier.

Keywords Warehousing, Facility logistics, Interactive animations, Virtual 3-D models, Educational media.