Background

We are living in a world that is seeing an accelerating trend towards globalised research and development that depends on integration and collaboration. How do we train students to succeed in this new environment? This article highlights some industry trends and best practices in R & D that may offer clues on how we can better prepare students for this new world and make learning more enjoyable for them.

Global R&D challenges

A dominant issue in industry is reduction of bottlenecks in the development process. In discussions across a breadth of industries ranging from communications to automotive, there are two themes that consistently arise:

• Converging Complexity—increasingly unfamiliar technologies are converging to make products more complex. For example, car radio has evolved from a AM/FM tuner to a full automotive telematics subsystem that integrates audio, video, navigation, diagnostics and communications functions into one device (Figure 1).
  
  

  
  Figure 1. A full automotive telematics subsystem
  

• Global Design to Manufacturing (GDM)—the development cycle is no longer confined to one team, one building, or even one country. Today’s engineering initiatives often span several teams, companies and culture, so achieving efficient and error-free development across these boundaries raises not just technical issues, but linguistic and behavioural ones as well.

Industry best practices

Companies are experimenting with many approaches, but the best practices in the development process can be grouped into two broad classes:

1. closed-loop-design methodologies that combine the traditionally separate tasks of design and validation into one integrated cycle;
   
   
2. adoption of a common development environment that promotes reuse of knowledge across development processes and teams.

From Closed-loop-design to Closed-loop-learning

The design iteration cycle can be abstracted into the four iterative steps of modeling, prototyping, testing and analysis (see inner cycle of Figure 2). Solutions to accelerating this cycle start from the following observations:

• modeling is vastly improved with modern computing tools, but effort spent on systems integration and design validation is growing due to increased complexity,
  
  
• significant losses in time and quality are caused by switching tools and breaking information flows at each phase of the cycle.
  


Figure 2. The design iteration cycle

These problems can be solved by first adopting tools that integrate with one another. Furthermore, the adoption of these tools needs to allow linked simulation and test methodologies that will in turn facilitate comparisons of actual to simulated results. Designers should also consider the development of structured design elements that can be reused in later processes.

No matter what tools are used, the success of this integrated process in industry suggests that students will benefit from acquiring their engineering and scientific skills in a similar manner. The four steps of industrial closed-loop-design cycle can be translated into matching elements of an effective closed-loop-learning process (see outer cycle of Figure 2) that is made up of learning the FUNdamentals, developing hands-on skills by building prototypes and troubleshooting the design using critical thinking to translate experimental data into meaningful information.

Can engineering and science education adopt these elements instead of using disjointed classroom and laboratory experiences? Can students use closed-loop-learning cycles that integrate a set of fundamentals that emphasises hands-on experience? A common misperception is that this requires significant and costly infrastructure and laborious development of new instructional materials, but my travels indicate that faculty members are doing this successfully with a minimum of materials and a maximum of creativity. For example, the Mindstorms/RoboLab robotics system developed jointly by Lego, Tufts University and National Instruments, is simple and flexible enough to teach university students elements of embedded control while allowing elementary children to have fun building robotic toys (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Robotic toys for elementary children

Most successful educators find creative ways to insert these methods into an existing curriculum and do not change the entire curriculum. The following are a few elements that educators are using to move students closer to a more integrated and fun learning process:

• use software to animate the theory, but add hands-on, experiential learning;
  
  
• select a few, common tools so that the focus is on principles and methods;
  
  
• offer design exercises to first-year students;
  
  
• challenge students with exciting, relevant projects (e.g. building an MP3 music player, exercise heart monitor, rain collection gauge).

* the article is based on an invited talk given at the annual conference of the U.S. Engineering Deans Institute in New Orleans in March, 2004.