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Can Museum Be a Good Venue for Manufacturing Education?

Abstract

A growing gap between technology use and technology understanding in a consumer society creates a need to educate general public about manufacturing - the backbone of a strong economy. This paper describes development of a museum exhibit: a visitor-centered informal education experience highlighting the principles of modern manufacturing. The exhibit architecture reflects three principal engineering activities involved in creating consumer products: product design, manufacturing, and marketing/business. It explains interrelations among them using as an example a well understood product – customizable pen. Each activity is implemented via two complementary components: an interactive computer game and a physical display environment. The selected results of an observational study and analysis of the data gathered through a data collection mechanism built into the software are also provided, suggesting a successful achievement of initial design goals.

Introduction

Despite steadily increasing dependency of modern societies on technology, society-wide understanding of technology (necessary, for example, in informed and critical decision-making) is usually lacking. Since about 70 percent of Americans are past the school age, updating their technological literacy requires access to opportunities outside of formal education. Younger generations have yet to develop their technological skills and interests, but opportunities for that in a structured, pre-college education are limited. The importance of inducing technological literacy and interests in younger generations cannot be overstated, as it impacts future supply of engineers and scientists.

Being avid consumers of manufactured products, contemporary American youths are very familiar with their wide variety due to the efforts of marketing campaigns, advertising media and their own use of the Internet. However, as they buy and use today’s products, they simultaneously hold no concept of how these products came to exist or how they are made. Overall, general public’s knowledge of manufacturing is relatively limited; also its perception is really outdated (usually stuck in mass production concepts) and unappealing. This lack of knowledge creates a strong demotivational barrier preventing many potential students from not only entering, but even considering the field. Such a knowledge gap creates an opportunity to educate the general public about what constitutes modern manufacturing.

This paper describes an effort to bridge the technological literacy gap, currently under way at the NSF Engineering Research Center for Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (ERC/RMS) at the University of Michigan. In this endeavor a museum exhibit, offering a visitor-centered informal learning experience, highlighting the principles of modern manufacturing is created, prototyped and tested. An innovative data gathering mechanism, embedded in the exhibit, was used to provide a snapshot of the individual visitor experience and also enabled more detailed demographic and performance analysis.

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Pasek, Z. (2006, June), Can Museum Be A Good Venue For Manufacturing Education? Paper presented at 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, Chicago, Illinois. 10.18260/1-2--1218