2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Infusing Internet of Things into Mechatronics to Train Mechanical Engineering Students for Smart Product Design

Presented at ME Division 5: Advancing Robotic and Mechanisms Education

Smart products that can connect to the Internet to exchange data are becoming ubiquitous. Mechanical engineers play an increasing role in innovating and designing smart products and manufacturing systems that incorporate the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. However, the current mechanical engineering curriculum has not kept pace. For the last three years, we have been designing, implementing and revising a new IoT course for mechanical engineering students. In this paper, we present the latest revisions of the new course based on the experience gained and the assessment data collected in the previous offerings. Also, we present the smart products designed by student teams. The course contains active learning and project-based learning components to provide interactive, hands-on experience in and out of class. A smart flowerpot device was integrated into the lectures as an active learning platform. At the end of the semester, student teams work on a project to design and build smart products with IoT capabilities. To help students manage their project development processes effectively, we introduced software engineering concepts and the agile method, which are often used in software development companies. The paper concludes with assessment details from the recent offering of the new course. This project was funded by a grant from the NSF-IUSE program.

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 Washington State University [biography]

Kristin Lesseig is an Associate Professor of Mathematics Education and Academic Director for 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 methods courses in addition to doctoral classes in mathematics and science education research.

Download paper (3.31 MB)

» Download paper

« View session