The ASME DSCC Mechatronics Technical Committee members reached our recently to Dr. Kapila to see if the Mechatronics Education Community would be interested in holding an Invited Session at the 2017 ASME DSCC Conference (October 10-13, 2017, Tysons Corner, Virginia). Dr. Kapila would like to explore this opportunity with the community. If you are interested in contributing a paper to the Mechatronics Education Innovation session, please provide the following details to Dr. Kapila (vkapila@nyu.edu) by Tuesday, April 4, 2017:
- Paper title,
- Author names and contact information
- Brief abstract
Five to six papers are required for the session. Full papers are due by April 12.
Vision for the Mechatronics Education Innovation Invited Session:
In a global, competitive marketplace, to sustain the U.S. quest for leadership through the creation of an "innovation economy," there is an acute need to train tomorrow's workforce in cooperative, active-learning environments with students from diverse educational backgrounds. The discipline of mechatronics offers a vehicle to address the challenges and opportunities inherent in interdisciplinary engineering education. The exciting fields of mechatronics can spark intellectual curiosity and engage the interest of students in hands-on engineering education, engineering research, and creative and entrepreneurial explorations. Mechatronics education programs can modernize engineering curricula offerings, make it relevant to students' interest, and address workforce demands for graduates who have broad interdisciplinary training and practical experience in the field of mechatronics with project work. The Invited Session organizers posit that through a systematic and intentional design of innovative educational programs, informed by best practices of emerging academic leaders and developed in collaboration with visionary industry practitioners, academic institutions can help prepare the engineering workforce that will realize the promise of mechatronics for societal benefit. Even as academic institutions design and implement mechatronics programs that impart students real-world experiences, there is a need to determine if and how students' education, training, and hands-on project skills are applicable in the workplace. The mechatronics community is sorely lacking a forum for a vigorous exchange of ideas on these topics. To remedy this, we propose to organize an Invited Session that brings together audiences with diverse perspectives so that important educational paradigms, innovations, and artifacts can be shared, examined, refined, and disseminated for wider adoption and adaptation. Papers outlining innovations at a single course or lab level, a sequence of courses and projects, as well as entire degree programs are welcome. Particularly relevant will be papers that examine novel and emerging opportunities in mechatronics, such as IoT, Digital Manufacturing, Robotics, etc.
