Lesson 6 of 14 Ways to Acquire
Reliability Engineering Knowledge
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In the meantime, you probably have plenty of ideas for experiments. Some quick and easy. Do them. Some may take significant planning and resources. Get started.
Experiments are a great way to practice your statistics. Sample size, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, design of experiments, all tools that you can master as you conduct meaningful experiments.
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When I was just starting my industry career as a manufacturing engineer my boss encouraged everyone on the team to do an experiment every day. Some were simple observations but at times they involved complex design of experiments.
We had to form a hypothesis and test it every day. He knew most of the experiments would not be useful, yet each one taught us a bit more about the factory and how it operated.
Although running good experiments is a skill, with deliberate practice you can improve. Yet even simple experiments, such as using a new technique for brainstorming during your next failure mode and effects analysis, may reveal a great new tool or at least an opportunity to learn. In the introduction to design of experiments in the book Statistics for Experimenters: Design, Innovation, and Discovery, 2nd Edition
, the authors outline experiments as a series of thoughtful steps to refine and discover the solution.
Experiment to Learn
The same holds true for education: The more you know, the better your questions become, which opens up even more opportunities for experiments. Learn by experimenting with your knowledge and observations.
As a judge for a grade school science fair I have seen plenty of volcano diagrams and soil variations on plant growth experiments. One student explored muscle memory for throwing or kicking a baseball or soccer ball. Her hypothesis was that the baseball players would have better muscle memory abilities than soccer players when throwing a baseball.
She described a simple experiment and the results. She had enthusiasm for continuing experiments; as she learned more, she wanted to know more. In the science fair interview she described three more experiments that she had already explored on topics that arose from the first experiment. She had a topic of interest and had just learned that she can do experiments to learn.
That was exciting.
Next Week: Teach
You are teaching when explaining a reliability concept to a colleague. Often when making a presentation you are educating your audience. Next week we’ll talk about how we have to master a topic to teach it well.
In the meantime, you probably have plenty of ideas for experiments. Some quick and easy. Do them. Some may take significant planning and resources. Get started.
Experiments are a great way to practice your statistics. Sample size, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, design of experiments, all tools that you can master as you conduct meaningful experiments.
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