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Experiential Learning for Advanced Manufacturing

A key part of undergraduate engineering education is experiential learning, which takes many forms: laboratory or shop assignments, project courses, research projects, co-op programs, extracurricular projects—and of course the “capstone course,” a required project course in the final one to three semesters of most engineering programs. Experiential learning activities are designed to allow students to gain knowledge or skills by doing. Here, we focus on hands-on activities that enable students to gain both knowledge and skills experientially. These learning experiences are often organized to address real-world problems, sometimes suggested by industrial partners or sponsors, and may end by constructing and testing a prototype, or in some cases deploying a solution and observing its impact.

Engineering programs already include experiential elements, but most do not yield experience with manufacturing or advanced manufacturing. Since these elements are already widespread, they represent a mechanism to increase exposure to manufacturing. Some colleges and universities already use these opportunities and are examples of “best practice.” This chapter shows some of the best uses of experiential approaches to learn about manufacturing and suggests ways that many more institutions could achieve similar gains.

In the context of undergraduate education, experiential learning activities can be divided into two broad categories: curricular and extracurricular. Curricular experiential learning activities (also loosely known as practicums)

are formally woven into the curriculum and may take a variety of forms, including the following:

• Capstone course project—A project that serves as a culminating academic experience for students, aimed at tying together what they have learned throughout their engineering education
• Cooperative education (co-op)—A program where students get academic credit for structured on-the-job experience related to their degree
• Work study—A program that provides students with part-time jobs related to their program as a form of financial assistance while enabling them to acquire on-the-job training
• Laboratories—Structured hands-on activities, often related to specific courses in an engineering program, aimed at providing students with experiential learning
• Research projects—Credentialed projects that are often performed by students either as independent study courses or as staff on faculty-led translational research efforts

In addition to the above, there are a variety of extracurricular (or cocurricular) activities that students may engage in to bolster their hands-on experiential learning. These include internships, student clubs, design competitions, and engagement with makerspaces, among others.

In response to a request for input issued by the committee, 157 stakeholders from the manufacturing industry (37 percent of the respondents) and academia (63 percent of the respondents) highlighted the importance of practicums and other experiential learning activities in preparing students for careers in advanced manufacturing; 88.9 percent mentioned internships and 80.6 percent mentioned hands-on laboratories. More observations from this request for input are presented in Appendix B. A report on the Future of Manufacturing conducted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and Autodesk highlighted a quote from Raju Dandu of Kansas State University, Salina: “One of the major skills the mechanical engineering student is lacking is that manufacturing aspect, which has to be integrated into the design. How will it be manufactured? How will it be handled by the users?”¹

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¹ American Society of Mechanical Engineers and Autodesk, 2022, Future of Manufacturing: New Workflows, Roles and Skills to Achieve Industry 4.0 Business Outcomes: Research Report, https://www.autodesk.com/campaigns/education/transforming-manufacturing-education-report, released September 7.

PROJECT COURSES AND THE CAPSTONE

The most common form of curricular experiential learning activity shared by nearly all U.S. undergraduate engineering programs is the capstone course project. The Capstone Design Survey, initiated by Susannah Howe, the capstone design director at Smith College, provides an excellent source of information about the current state of capstone projects.² It has been carried out three times—in 1994, 2005, and 2015—with the next one scheduled for 2025; Howe reported that there were 360 respondents in 1994, 444 in 2005, and 522 in 2015. The greatest number of responses came from those in the mechanical and aerospace engineering fields, followed by electrical and computer engineering, civil and environmental engineering, chemical engineering, and biomedical engineering. Only a few of the respondents were in the manufacturing field. So, the survey results are not specific to manufacturing but apply to the engineering field, broadly speaking.

Most capstone courses lasted one or two semesters, with more than half of the respondents in 2015 reporting two-semester capstone courses. Furthermore, there was a clear trend toward longer capstone courses, with some now as long as 2 years. The survey results indicate that the number of students taking capstone courses at various institutions has been growing over time.

The most common structure for capstone courses was to have the class and project done in parallel, although a significant minority of the courses were either a class followed by a project or a project only. There were no class-only capstone courses, so the project is clearly a major part of such courses.

In Howe’s survey, the objectives for the capstone projects originated from industry, government, faculty research, external competitions, and the students themselves. In 2015, 80 percent of the respondents reported that industry or government was the source for at least some of their students’ capstone projects. Much of the funding for the projects came from the colleges and universities, but a significant percentage of it came from the projects’ industrial sponsors, and students provided some of the funding as well.

Discussions with various experts from academia, however, revealed that capstone courses and projects do not typically involve manufacturing or advanced manufacturing. Most focus on the problem-solving, analysis,

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² S. Howe, L. Rosenbauer, and S. Poulos, 2017, “The 2015 Capstone Design Survey Results: Current Practices and Changes Over Time,” Northampton, MA: Engineering: Faculty Publications, Smith College, https://scholarworks.smith.edu/egr_facpubs/9.

design, and perhaps prototyping phases of engineering, stopping short of any experience in real manufacturing.

However, capstone projects—already operated at large scale—can be adjusted to give students experience with manufacturing. One of the more advanced examples of capstone projects involving manufacturing was from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly). Amy Fleischer, dean of engineering at Cal Poly, explained that every engineering student in all 14 of the college’s degree programs undertakes a senior capstone project, and most of them incorporate a significant build phase. The mechanical engineering program, in particular, requires all of its students’ projects to go to the prototyping phase. The college also offers interdisciplinary senior design projects, and students in the manufacturing program do blended projects that combine industrial engineering and manufacturing engineering. “As they work through those projects,” Fleischer said, “they are building not only the prototypes but also looking at costing and how they would transition to scale manufacturing.”³ Similarly, according to Chris Saldaña, Ring Family Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), mechanical engineering students at Georgia Tech factor manufacturing considerations into their projects through assessing the cost of scaling up and outsourcing production of a single unit.⁴ Some schools, like Virginia Tech and Pennsylvania State University, have so-called learning factories that allow students, as part of their capstone projects, to work closely with manufacturing companies to implement advanced manufacturing solutions. And as mentioned in Chapter 2, Harvey Mudd College has been running an Engineering Clinic in its engineering program for 50 years, where “student teams solve real-world problems for industry sponsors.”⁵

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³ A. Fleischer, College of Engineering, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, presentation at Infusing Advanced Manufacturing in Engineering Education Virtual Workshop, February 25, 2022.

⁴ C. Saldaña, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022, presentation at Infusing Advanced Manufacturing in Engineering Education Virtual Workshop, February 25.

⁵ M. Klawe, 2015, “Why Manufacturing Is Vital to Engineering Education,” Forbes, June 8, https://www.forbes.com/sites/mariaklawe/2015/06/08/why-manufacturing-is-vital-to-engineering-education.

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING THROUGHOUT THE UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM

While capstone projects provide students with experiential learning at the end of their degree program, it is important to infuse experiential learning throughout the curriculum. A common way for achieving this in the U.S. education system is hands-on laboratories and projects attached to engineering and manufacturing courses.

A variety of institutions have incorporated these into their core curricula. For example, Cal Poly has a manufacturing engineering degree program that features a lot of hands-on laboratory activities every year. First-year students in the manufacturing engineering program are exposed to basic types of manufacturing—electronics fabrication, materials removal, materials joining, casting, and so on—and then, in later years, the students learn about more advanced types of manufacturing. The manufacturing classrooms combine lecture spaces with laboratory spaces, so students can learn a topic in the classroom and immediately practice it in the laboratory. The laboratory spaces have a combination of traditional hand-driven equipment and basic CNC (computer numerical control) machines, and students move to the more complicated machinery as they advance through the program. After the students have mastered different techniques, they combine them to create machines from scratch. Similarly, the University of Michigan has a Design and Manufacturing course sequence progressing from the sophomore to the senior levels, with each course infused with hands-on laboratory activities involving prototyping using three-dimensional (3D) printers and CNC machine tools. A similar sequence is run at Georgia Tech. The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) has a hands-on manufacturing laboratory sequence that includes some scale-up considerations based on injection molding, as well as a senior-level additive manufacturing elective course involving lots of hands-on activities.

Hands-on laboratories and projects on advanced manufacturing need not only be associated with manufacturing courses. They could be integrated

into nonmanufacturing courses as well. For example, a course on strength of materials could include a laboratory where students 3D print a variety of cantilever beams to help them better understand bending of beams, while giving them a chance to hone their manufacturing skills.

TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH

Translational (or applied) research, often inspired by problems that arise as a fundamental technology emerges, attacks problems whose solution will have a direct impact. Unlike product development, translational research results are applicable more broadly and often lead to further development of a technology. Applied research is a major contributor to the refining and maturing of advanced manufacturing technologies, carried out by universities, industry, and other institutions such as the Manufacturing USA innovation institutes.

Undergraduates participating in advanced manufacturing applied research projects not only learn deeply about advanced manufacturing but also may see their work’s impact. A student’s engagement may start out as an “independent study” in which a faculty member engages him on her research, but may lead to summer employment, then a year working for the company that is supporting the research, mentored by the company engineer who is also a researcher on the project. The student may encounter state-of-the-art technologies and experiments not generally known. This is not only education and learning, it is also contributing, becoming an engineer, and entering the professional culture.

Currently, applied research probably cannot benefit as many undergraduates as the more widespread, and often mandatory, capstone project courses. However, some universities are making concerted efforts to integrate undergraduate research more strongly into their curriculum to increase its access to students. For example, the University of Michigan has a RISE (Research, Innovation, Service, and Entrepreneurship) sequence of courses stretching from the sophomore to the senior year that allow students to perform research under the supervision of a faculty member and receive course credit. To facilitate exposure of this course and the resulting projects,

a symposium is held at the end of each semester where students present their research projects as poster or oral presentations. Some RISE projects involve advanced manufacturing. For example, a team of students worked on a National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored project on automated fault detection in 3D printing as part of their RISE project, which eventually led to a provisional patent application and journal publication.⁶ One of the students, a sophomore at the time he completed the project, is now leading the 3D printing club at Michigan and is well positioned for a career in advanced manufacturing. Benefits to undergraduates engaging in applied research are enthusiastically reported.⁷

Another way of expanding the portfolio and access to advanced manufacturing research projects for students is to engage them in projects led by industry or by one of the innovation institutes. These opportunities can be amplified by increasing the support for applied research in advanced manufacturing and adding incentives for undergraduate participation (such as NSF’s research experiences for undergraduates, REU⁸). The students who participate are likely to become superb engineers.

Collaborative research and development efforts between industry and academia naturally lend themselves to applied research. Such engagement is beneficial to all parties involved. Most industrial research is targeted toward a shorter timeframe (e.g., 1–3 years) to ensure a reasonable return on investment time horizon. The research is typically applied, as it must move a product, process, or capability of the industrial partner toward final deployment. Leveraging universities to conduct applied research is a pragmatic and low-risk approach for industries if executed properly. For example, universities can bring to bear larger teams of engineers (graduate and undergraduate students, as well as faculty and staff), so the industrial partner does not have to hire an employee. Once the project is complete, the students graduate and secure jobs that may be linked to their research sponsor. By hiring the graduating students, the sponsor can effectively transfer the knowledge base of the applied research project to the company. However, the sponsor does not have

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⁶ S. Aidala, Z. Eichenberger, N. Chan, K. Wilkinson, and C. Okwudire, 2022, “MTouch: An Automatic Fault Detection System for Desktop FFF 3D Printers Using a Contact Sensor,” International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology 120(11):8211–8224.

⁷ R.C. Pearson, K.K. Crandall, K. Dispennette, and J.M. Maples, 2017, Introduction in “Students’ Perceptions of an Applied Research Experience in an Undergraduate Exercise Science Course,” International Journal of Exercise Science 10(7):926–941.

⁸ Information about the REU program is at National Science Foundation, 2022, “Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU),” https://beta.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/research-experiences-undergraduates-reu.

a specific or implied responsibility to hire the students. Thus, companies can “spin-up” significant research teams in a very cost-effective manner without longer-term employment implications.

The academia/industry/government roles in supporting applied research in advanced manufacturing are elaborated in Chapter 4.

VARIED EDUCATIONAL PATHWAYS

Students engage in a variety of cocurricular or extracurricular activities to bolster their curricular experiential learning. The most common is internships, which students often perform at will, typically during their summer vacation. Internships provide students with a lot of on-the-job experience. However, since they are not formally woven into the curriculum, little or no oversight is provided by the university. Moreover, the internship experience can vary wildly from student to student, depending on the opportunities available to them or the opportunities they elect.

Students can also gain experiential learning through other extracurricular activities, like student clubs and competitions (e.g., solar car team, baja racing, etc.) and through engagement with makerspaces that provide them with exposure to advanced manufacturing. For example, Georgia Tech’s Flowers Invention Studio and UT Austin’s InventionWorks makerspaces provide a variety of advanced manufacturing tools for students to use at will.

There is effort at some universities to incorporate some extracurricular activities into the curriculum, or at least to credential them. For example, Penn State has undergraduates build a portfolio, which may include extracurricular activities, as they go through their years in engineering. Texas A&M University has a program that requires students to get some sort of experience outside of the classroom. The requirement, called Engineering X, is that a student complete something in addition to what is required in the student’s major, and the specifics vary by department. It could be a 48-hour challenge, for instance, or an internship. A very interesting arrangement between Auburn University’s mechanical engineering program and a neigh-

boring community college requires Auburn students to obtain machine shop certification from Southern Union State Community College.⁹

Co-op and work-study programs are no longer common at U.S. academic institutions. That said, some universities, like the University of Cincinnati (which claims to have invented co-op programs over 100 years ago), continue to run co-op programs. Another example is the America’s Cutting Edge (ACE) machining training program offered by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, which is being scaled up to more universities across the country. However, co-ops are popular in some locations outside the United States. For example, Kathleen Thelen, Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke to the committee about the dual-study program, a type of co-op/work-study program that is growing in popularity in Germany. In the dual-study program, university studies and in-firm training proceed side by side. The structure and content of studies are negotiated with the university by individual firms or groups of firms. Students enroll in the program through the participating firms and not through the university directly. The firm pays the apprentice’s tuition fees and also pays the apprentice a wage (so they earn money while they study). Often, firms require that apprentices agree to stay with the company after completion for some period of time (usually 3 years). Thelen explained that a major difference between the co-op programs in the United States and the dual-study program in Germany is that the firms are much more involved in the process in Germany. For example, the firms select the students, rather than the U.S. approach, where the university selects students and then helps them find placements with firms.¹⁰

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⁹ G.A. Harris, Interdisciplinary Center for Advanced Manufacturing Systems (ICAMS), Auburn University, 2021, presentation to the committee, December 2, Washington, DC: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

¹⁰ K. Thelen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2022, presentation to the committee, January 5, Washington, DC: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

• Government-sponsored advanced manufacturing institutes (e.g., Manufacturing USA, Manufacturing Innovation Institutes, and Manufacturing Extension Partnerships) should broker opportunities for hands-on experiential learning for students by linking the students (or their institutions) with relevant industry partners. (Also see Chapter 4.)
• Students should receive academic credit or credentials for cocurricular and extracurricular advanced manufacturing activities, like internships, certificate training, and student club activities, given some degree of quality control and standardization.

FACILITIES AND RESOURCES

The practical aspects of engineering education depend on facilities—hardware and software—that are those of the contemporary professional engineer. Students are poorly served if they have inadequate access to facilities or only to facilities that are obsolete in the profession. Donations and deep discounts by industry are essential for maintaining these facilities, but they are unevenly distributed among educational institutions.

Software

Many software companies provide their product to universities (and other educational institutions) at no cost or at a highly discounted cost. This provides the students, who will make purchasing decisions over their careers, with some experience with a software product. Examples of companies that have successfully provided discounted software to educational institutions, resulting in substantial industry adoption, include MathWorks (MATLAB), Microsoft (Office), LabVIEW (National Instruments), and Dassault Systèmes (SOLIDWORKS). Such offerings can also be highly beneficial to corporate users as students become familiar with packages and are easily integrated into corporate infrastructures. For example, Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), based on freeware (e.g., Google Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides), is used heavily by the undergraduate student population. When these students matriculate to companies that use Google Workspace, they are already familiar with its operation and become productive at a more rapid rate.

Nonetheless, partnerships between industry and software companies can be more progressive and beneficial to both parties involved. For example, class engagement can be used to test software capabilities and interfaces for the company. Such testing needs to have an appropriate protocol developed such that input from the academic users is provided directly to the software development team, and updates to the software are rapidly deployed back to the academic test environment. Input from the academic partner not only includes “bugs” but also other elements, such as workflow, determination of desired options for the project, and an understanding of what product options/capabilities are most heavily used. For the academic institution, the ability to be exposed to, use, and test new software capabilities is of paramount importance in training next-generation manufacturing engineers. Designing for or operating new advanced manufacturing equipment may require device-specific software; again, the ability for the university to operate at the cutting edge of advanced manufacturing is important.

Many computer-aided design (CAD)/computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) systems are beginning to utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities such as generative design. Working with an industry partner, universities can develop curricula that leverage such capabilities while training students how to use these capabilities in pragmatic ways. For example, generative design is now incorporated in many CAD products. However, there is very little curriculum available that teaches students the best way to leverage such a capability. By working with the CAD system suppliers, a more standardized and proven curriculum using generative design can be developed. Such a development path could easily be documented to provide a methodology for future integration of next-generation technologies. Development of such courses needs to be pursued.

Such academic and industry synergies could easily form the foundation for scaling and deployment of new technologies into the undergraduate manufacturing curricula and eventually directly into the workforce in much the same manner that Google Workspace, Microsoft Office, MATLAB, and LabVIEW have been successful in penetrating the academic marketplace. Furthermore, such collaboration could easily be disseminated beyond a single academic partnership by the industry partner. Finally, development of dissemination materials by the industry partner could be leveraged by the academic partner. For example, many companies have developed web-based training for their systems. Such training is often used as a starting point for student training. Collaborative efforts between academia and industry in this area will result in a constant refresh of training material.

Hardware

A major impediment to having hands-on experiential learning activities that incorporate advanced manufacturing is the capital- and space-intensive nature of advanced manufacturing. With the exception of relatively small programs, like Cal Poly’s manufacturing program, which produces about 25 graduates per year, very few schools with large undergraduate student populations have the resources to provide hands-on manufacturing laboratories to all their students.

A related challenge is that advanced manufacturing is a rapidly evolving field. The equipment needed to provide experiential learning is constantly changing, and it costs a lot to keep replacing equipment to provide students with state-of-the-art training. Another challenge is that, as discussed in Chapter 2, many professors at undergraduate engineering programs do not have industrial experience and therefore are unlikely to have the knowledge, motivation, or skills to provide students with meaningful hands-on experiential learning.

As manufacturing technologies increasingly use digital techniques, access to computing hardware or capacity becomes important. Advanced software for modeling and simulation is not useful without access to substantial computing facilities, perhaps in the cloud. At the other extreme is the hardware of the advanced factory: microcomputers, Internet of Things components, sensors, and the like, not always readily available on the retail market.

A major opportunity—and a challenge—for delivering access to facilities is remote access via the internet. Many aspects of the advanced manufacturing factory could be operated remotely: a designer sends her design for fabrication, expecting a sample part by overnight delivery. Perhaps that works for the experienced, but the learner will need feedback: a critique of the design as it is about to be printed on a powder bed, a critique of the result, and counsel about how to improve. Such a “remote factory for the learning designer” is not a distant vision, but nor is it reality. Such a facility, even a modest beginning, would make true advanced manufacturing (as contrasted with desktop 3D printers) available to undergraduate engineering students. To build understanding and adoption of their new products, equipment vendors might offer such online services or add their equipment to the remote factory.

Chapter 4 deals with the roles of industry and government in advancing undergraduate education, especially in the form of engagement and financial support.