Training engineering students through a digital humanities project: Techn'hom Time Machine

The Techn’hom Time Machine project aims to offer a digital reconstruction of a spinning mill, integrating buildings in their environment, machines, and activities. It involves engineering students from the Belfort-Montbéliard University of Technology, in all aspects of the project. They are able to discover and practise on software that they will have to use in their future professional activity (Revit, Catia, Blender, Unity…). Some students are able to discover entire conceptual fields that are rarely covered in their course, such as the notions of ontology and RDF database. A special relationship between history and digital technology underlies this work: students have a choice about which software to use, their results directly impact the evolution of the project, and they learn the importance of the whole organizing. These students, unfamiliar with humanities and specific problems associated with them, are at the same time discovering these disciplines and their difficulties, thus opening up their perspectives.