2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 352: Preparing Mechanical Engineering Students for Industry 4.0: an Internet of Things Course

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

Smart products can sense their environment, analyze lots of data (big data), and connect to the Internet to allow exchanging data. These capabilities are known as the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. As they become ubiquitous, smart products provide enormous opportunities for scientists and engineers to invent new products and influence interconnected systems of vast scale. Mechanical engineers will play a significant role in innovating and designing smart products and manufacturing systems of the Industry 4.0 revolution. However, the current mechanical engineering curriculum has not kept pace. In this paper, we present details of a new IoT course for mechanical engineering students. The course contains active learning and project-based learning components. Specifically, a smart flower pot device was integrated into the lectures of the course as an active learning platform. In addition, the course incorporates team projects involving design of smart products. The agile method, often used in software development companies, is introduced to the mechanical engineering students to manage their project development process. The paper concludes with assessment details from the first offering of the new course.

Authors

Prof. Hakan Gurocak Washington State University, Vancouver [biography]

Prof. Gurocak is the founding director of Professional and Corporate Education (PACE) program at Washington State University Vancouver. His research interests include haptics, robotics and automation.
Dr. Xinghui Zhao Washington State University [biography]

Dr. Xinghui Zhao is the Director of the School of Engineering and Computer Science, and Associate Professor of Computer Science at Washington State University Vancouver. She received her Ph.D. from Department of Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan in 2012. She previously received an M.Sc. from the same university, and a B.Sc. from Department of Computer Science, Nanjing University. Dr. Zhao’s research interests lie in the general areas of parallel and distributed systems, big data computing, cloud computing, and machine learning. Dr. Zhao is a member of IEEE, ACM, ASEE, and IEEE Women in Engineering, and has been actively contributing to the professional community. She served as the general chair for the 15th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC2022) and the 9th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Big Data Computing, Applications and Technologies (BDCAT2022). She also served as the local arrangement chair for IEEE CLUSTER 2021. She was the guest editor for Special Issue on Integration of Cloud, IoT and Big Data Analytics, Software: Practice and Experience (Wiley Press). In addition, she has served on the technical program committee for a number of conferences, and as reviewer for various journals.
Dr. Kristin Lesseig [biography]

Kristin Lesseig is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education in the College of Education at Washington State University Vancouver. She earned her PhD at Oregon State University and currently teaches elementary and secondary mathematics content and

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