Modeling for Product Reliability

In this lesson series, students learn about the role of reliability engineering in product development and then engage in a math modeling experience using data related to reliability experiments from my fellowship at Facebook Reality Labs. Student teams immediately dive into building potential model functions for the data and context. These initial modeling attempts serve as the foundation for extending and refining students’ knowledge of functions and transformations as they analyze their models and seek to improve them. To support students’ productive struggle in this challenging problem solving context, the experience will be framed in terms of James Nottingham’s “Learning Pit.” Lesson resources provided here include an introduction to reliability engineering, templates for modeling with functions (suitable for a variety of modeling contexts), real/simulated data from my fellowship, a rubric for model analysis, and tools for assessing student mindset regarding challenging work.