Skills Development for Modern Industry

Vigor Yang

Member of NAE; Professor, Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

 Needs, curiosity and vision will define the future development. There are four most important challenges that lie ahead of us: permanent sustainability, life quality, willingness to learn and social progress. In order to cultivate engineering students with the ability to deal with these challenges, we must first improve the education of students. Second, we must foster their spirit of courage and teamwork. Finally, to be an outstanding engineer, the student must play an active role in leading the society at the regional, national and international levels.

Engineers who can engineer——
The CDIO-model for development of university engineering programmes

Sören Östlund

Head of the Department of Solid Mechanics, Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm

 Graduated engineers should be able to Conceive-Design-Implement and Operate complex value-added engineering systems in a modern team-based environment, considering business and societal requirements. This is what our graduated engineers should be able to do! Engineering education should also prepare students for possible career tracks. A set of clear, complete, consistent goals and objectives for undergraduate engineering education are very important. We must educate students who can understand how to conceive-design-implement-operate, complex value-added engineering systems, in a modern team-based engineering environment, and are mature and thoughtful individuals. This leads to the CDIO Syllabus. There are some considerations when we make the CDIO Syllabus: rational, comprehensive, stakeholder prioritized, peer-reviewed and appropriate.

GIX : Global Innovation eXchange

Blake Hannaford

Director of Global Innovation Exchange (GIX), University of Washington

 The Global Innovation Exchange, established by Tsinghua University and the University of Washington, is an innovative education platform founded in the Greater Seattle area with the support of Microsoft. The Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) is equipped with advanced education resources, and adopts an innovative master's program training model featuring project-driven, team-based method to establish an innovative and diversified education platform. Exclusively built for the GIX education program, the GIX Teaching and Research Building is located in the beautiful Bellevue, offering a comfortable learning experience for students.

3D Printing Provides Help for Engineering Education

Li Tao

General Manager, Shining 3D

 In recent years, digital manufacturing technology is undergoing dramatic changes. In the context of Industry 4.0, scale and personalized customization have begun to attract increasingly wide attention. The scale and personalized customization requires various links in the manufacturing system merge with each other, which poses a great challenge to the entire technical application conditions. The application of 3D digital technology can precisely resolve such issues. This article demonstrates a practical case of applying 3D digital technology in mass entrepreneurship and innovation projects carried out in the university.

Skills Development for Modern Industry 

Thomas Lee
Chief Education Officer, Quanser; Adjunct Professor, University of Waterloo

 As an emerging industry, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) manufacturing is also an industry that future engineers will closely follow up. We have worked with a number of university partners on UAV projects and incorporated them into the curriculum. The project enables the students to build an automated, simulated drone with the “scaffolding” method we provided. For students, the project is complicated and relatively expensive, but it can help them to develop complicated and systematic thinking from the first day.

Cooperative Training of Engineering Practice Ability of Mechanical Students

Zhang Xianmin

Dean, School of Mechanical & Automotive Engineering, South China University of Technology

 South China University of Technology put forward the collaborative training mode of engineering talents in order to address the problems existing in the mechanical major undergraduate training program. The university set up classes for innovation and excellent engineers especially for mechanical majors, aiming to cultivating talents with competence in originality, innovation, entrepreneurship and creation. In this model, the university has cooperated with famous overseas universities to give students a broad international perspective, cooperated with famous domestic universities to cultivate students' team cooperation ability, cooperated with characteristic enterprises to cultivate students' engineering practice ability, and cooperated with relevant majors to cultivate students' comprehensive knowledge ability. This model has been adopted in mechanical related majors and achieved excellent results.