Project-based experience through real manufacturing activities in mechanical engineering

Abstract

As reported by many professional bodies responsible for accrediting engineering programs, today's engineering graduates present important limitations in the practice of engineering because current engineering curricula is still too focused on fundamental engineering science without providing sufficient integration to industrial practice. To overcome these limitations, active learning approaches have been applied in the literature with positive results in engagement, motivation and student's performance. In this paper, we propose a project based learning approach with real manufacturing activities in a 4-year mechanical course to improve the learning process. The goal of the project is to plan the manufacturing process of a real part and conduct at shop-floor levels all the activities required. The experience was evaluated considering project/exam grades, questionnaires and manufacturing quality. The results showed an increase in student's satisfaction, improvement in the exam performance, and a clearly increase in student's enrolment in the manufacturing master degree.

Project-based learning of advanced CAD/CAE tools in engineering education

“…The recent literature in the field of engineering education shows a growing interest in the use of PjBL as an active learning approach [36,37] that emphasizes the project and stimulates collaboration and teamwork. Demonstrative examples are reported in [35,[38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46]. Practically speaking, PjBL may be interpreted as an assignment that the students have to complete by leveraging their theoretical background and by performing constructive investigations.…”

Learning benefits by integrating design, manufacturing, and testing in a course for compressible flow visualizations

“…Active, problem-based and project-based approaches in teaching have shown to be effective for conceptual learning and for fostering the ability to apply knowledge to real world settings. 2,12,13 Problem-based learning is a teaching approach around investigation of meaningful problems, leading to Self-Directed learning (SDL). 13 Usually, the pedagogy is student-centered in a loosely pre-defined setting.…”

“…Although engineering is by nature an applied and interdisciplinary field, courses in engineering can lead even the best students to develop knowledge that is disconnected from other related fields and from conditions of application. 1,2 This problem is not unique to engineering—educators have warned against the problems of inert knowledge for at least a century 3 —but the field of engineering faces particular challenges in this area, as the complex problems facing engineers routinely require multiple disciplines and tight connections between theory and application. 4…”

Inquiry-based learning: Development of an introductory manufacturing processes course based on a mobile inverted pendulum robot

“…Most recently, Abellán-Nebot 19 reported a project-based learning experience in which the goal is set to manufacture a part requiring shop-floor activities and covering fundamentals of process planning applied to casting, machining, and economic consideration. The study shows that the project increased students’ performance, motivation, and engagement so that a much higher percentage of students even consider a manufacturing career.…”