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Immersing Students in Reengineering to Make Industry Meaningful in College

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

An innovative capstone project at Illinois Valley Community College immerses engineering design and electronics students in the technology and methodology they will encounter in the workplace.

The four-semester project gives the students first-hand experience with continuous quality improvement methodology, reengineering, and entrepreneurship. Freshmen engineering transfer students, enrolled in an engineering graphics course, and freshmen design and electronics students, enrolled in a beginning CAD course, are brought into the continuous quality improvement loop in their first semester; they analyze and recommend improvements on products previously designed by student teams. In their second semester, the CAD design and electronics students fine tune the product redesigns. Freshmen CAD students complete the set of working drawings.

The process is repeated every year. When the freshmen CAD students become sophomore design students, they 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. In that fourth semester, the engineering design students are enrolled in Design Projects, which is a capstone for Associate in Applied Science degree programs in CAE/CAD. They assume the role of project managers to implement the production of products. The business students are enrolled in a course, which is a capstone in their A.A.S. degree programs. This one- semester, entrepreneurial, capstone project is called Making Industry Meaningful In College or MIMIC since it creates a simulated industrial environment for students to sharpen their technical skills as well as teamwork, critical thinking, problem solving and communication skills.

Over the course of the project, the technical students not only benefit from extensive experience with the technology in their fields, but as a result of their teamwork, they become more aware of technology outside of their fields

The four-semester program is a redesign of a one-semester multi-disciplinary project IVCC pioneered ten years ago. The original project required student teams to accomplish the entire process – from product decision and design to sales – in one semester. The limited time frame did not allow enough time for the students to design viable products. The expanded 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), Immersing Students In Reengineering To Make Industry Meaningful In College Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14820