2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A well-known challenge in engineering education is the attempt to balance the demands of industry recruitment with the core needs of an already packed engineering curriculum. Due to time constraints, real-world examples and other learning opportunities that aim to develop and consolidate the industry-desirable skills can be difficult to include in the curriculum. One way to address this challenge is to collaborate with industry (for example, on capstone projects, student team challenges, etc) while the students are still studying. A place for these collaborations, which can provide benefit for both parties, is through student competitions. Student competitions in engineering can be taken on as an extra-curricular activity or included in the curriculum in the form of a group or senior project. Students work in a collaborative environment to design and build a specific product that will satisfy certain criteria and perform competitively to complete specific objectives. These projects allow students to get hands-on experience in solving a range of engineering problems like those they will face in their careers. It is this real-world problem solving that makes student competitions an excellent place for developing these industry-academia collaborations to supplement the curriculum.
In this paper, we will highlight how the XXX supports the activities of student competitions through free software access, training, and other means as part of a larger academic support strategy. The benefits for both company and academia, as well as the challenges, will also be discussed. Our goal in sharing these efforts is to continue to learn from the community on how to best bridge this gap.