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Best of Ten: Reengineering Makes Industry Meaningful in College

Dorene Perez, Jim Gibson, Rose Marie Lynch Illinois Valley Community College

An entrepreneurial project at Illinois Valley Community College immerses engineering design and electronics students in reengineering over the entire course of their two-year technical programs.

The four-semester program brings freshmen engineering and electronics students into the continuous quality improvement loop in their first semester courses where they analyze and recommend improvements on products previously designed and produced by student teams. In their second semester, the engineering and electronics students fine-tune the product redesigns, and freshmen CAD students complete the set of working drawings.

In their third semester, the CAD design students create models and, working with electronics students, create prototypes of the redesigned products.

In the fourth semester, the project culminates with the addition of business students and the formation of student teams or "companies," which manufacture, market and sell the products. The engineering design, electronics and business classes are scheduled at a common time to allow the student "companies" to meet. Integrating students from various disciplines not only fulfills the technical needs of the project, but also provides valuable interaction and communication opportunities.

This entrepreneurial Reengineering Makes Industry Meaningful In College program not only exposes students to the world of industry within the confines of the classroom, it is a replicable, cost-effective model that can be adapted to a varying number of semesters and integrated into a variety of technical programs and college settings.

The origin of entrepreneurship in engineering and electronics at IVCC

Ten years ago, the engineering design instructor and a business instructor at Illinois Valley Community College developed a creative plan to provide their students with workplace, entrepreneurial experiences. As a project in one of their courses, the instructors integrated their students into teams to develop, produce and sell a product. They named the project Making Industry Meaningful In College or MIMIC. A few years later the technical side of the teams expanded when electronics students were added to the project. The business side also expanded, and a MIMIC business course was developed as a capstone for students in Associate in Applied Science degree programs in marketing, accounting, management, computer systems and information systems. Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education

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Gibson, J., & Perez, D., & Lynch, R. M. (2005, June), Best Of Ten: Reengineering Makes Industry Meaningful In College Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14845