Final Year Projects with Involvement of Industry and High Schools

Session T4C

Final Year Projects with Involvement of Industry and High Schools Andrew Nafalski and Zorica Nedic University of South Australia, [email protected], [email protected] Abstract - In the final year of undergraduate degree programs in the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of South Australia (UniSA), students accomplish hands-on design projects that account for a quarter of the year’s academic credit load. The majority of the projects, depending on a year between 60% and 80% - are industry sponsored, i.e. industry defines the project specification and provides industry supervisor(s) and resources in cash and/or inkind contributions. This gives students an opportunity to develop links with industry and build up their skills, knowledge and industry-relevant practical experience in a specialised engineering field, facilitating their rapid industrial employment. Recently also high school students have been involved in these projects, as reported in the paper. The program has been successfully running for the past 3 years and proved to bring benefits to high school students, university students and also to companies that participate in the program. Index Terms – Industry sponsored projects, outreach projects, service learning, generic skills.

INTRODUCTION In recent years, UniSA has initiated final year projects that also involve high school students. This has been inspired by a major shortage of engineering graduates that need to be addressed at the high school level if not earlier. The projects are designed to develop and foster interest in engineering among high school students and also to develop management and generic skills of final year university students. One of such projects, accomplished in 2007 was sponsored by Tenix Defence company and involved 3 university students, 3 high school students, 1 high school teacher, 2 university supervisors and 3 industry mentors. The purpose of the project was to develop an airship to demonstrate a concept of intelligent indoor aerial surveillance. A fully functional airship has been produced by the joint effort. The university students have also exposed some 3,500 school pupils to the engineering field by their presentations at open days, science shows and “engineering your future” events. The paper discusses the innovative, multifaceted projects that have led to the development of valuable skills

of both university and high school students, going beyond the ordinary expectations. Recommendations for the future projects at UniSA and elsewhere are included. INDUSTRY SPONSORSHIP The gap between the required employment demand in the marketplace and the number of graduates employment ready in engineering and science has prompted a number of initiatives. These include the Cooperative Education Division (CED) that promotes Cooperative Education Programs (Co-op) in Engineering and Engineering Technology to business and industries across the U.S. and beyond and has also linked to the Project Lead The Way curriculum that has been adopted in 45 states and touches over 175,000 secondary school students [1]. In Australia, a number of initiatives have been implemented EG Service-learning is a teaching and learning pedagogical approach that combines active student learning with a meaningful community service. The intentional link between learning and service objectives provides mutual benefits to and a positive change and enrichment for both the students and the community recipients. Students engaged in service learning have an opportunity for self-reflection, understanding and acquiring of values, skills and knowledge. Service learning is not limited to universities; it involves all levels of education, can have a national and/or international dimension and in some countries such as the USA takes on a massive scale. In 2006, 79% of colleges and universities of Higher Education Consortium in the USA reported that the service learning is a part of the core curriculum. Some 30% students (several million) in public and private 4-year institutions of higher education participated in a course where service is part of the curriculum (Learn and Serve America, 2008) [1]. Industry sponsored final year projects are the focus of the similar initiatives. HIGH SCHOOL INVOLVEMENT

High school students participate in the program through their year 12 extension studies equivalent to one year long subject that is formally assessed at the end of the year by external moderators. The Industry Sponsored Projects (ISP) program has been introduced as an extension of another outreach program, Robotics Peer Mentoring (RPM) [2, 3] which targets high school students of year 10-11. In RPM high school students are guided by the university students as mentors through a 10 week project where they assemble and 978-1-4244-1970-8/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE October 22 – 25, 2008, Saratoga Springs, NY 38th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference T4C-7

Session T4C program a robotic vehicle. Since its introduction in 2002 more than 2000 high-school students participated in the RPM program. Through this program students gain practical skills like soldering and microcontroller programming. Through the interaction with university mentors students also learn a lot about engineering profession and studying at university. The ISPs were initiated to continue fostering the high school students’ interest in engineering throughout year 12 of their studies. However, these are open ended projects and supervision of high school students with a limited technical knowledge would require extensive effort from the company which sponsors the project. The solution was found in forming teams of high school students and university students, mentors to work together on joint projects sponsored by industry. This way both groups gain valuable skills: younger students learn technical and generic engineering skills from their mentors and mentors learn management and communication skills highly valued by the industry employers. Figure 1 shows a UniSA mentor in action, helping a Salisbury High School student to solder a component on an electronic board.

At the end of the 1st month, the high school students submit a project proposal to be approved by the external moderators. At the end of the project they have to submit a set of documents, to deliver a presentation of the project and pass a formal interview about their learning experience during the project. Therefore, they are expected not only to gain scientific and technical knowledge, but also oral and written communication skills. The mentors, teachers and the supervisors play an important role in the development of these skills. If needed, industry partners provide training sessions for high school students to develop technical skills like learning programming language, or development of engineering project documentation skills.

FIGURE 2 A MEETING WITH INDUSTRY AND ACADEMIC SUPERVISORS.

EXAMPLES

FIGURE 1 MENTORING IN ACTION

During the 10 months duration of the project the group meets for about 3 hours every week to work on the project with a high school teacher present. Every second week the group also meets with supervisors from industry and with UniSA academic supervisors. Figure 2 demonstrates one such meeting. The final year project accounts for ¼ of the full load study which is 1.25 days per week over one academic year. In their schedule, they usually have at least one day free of classes and commonly another morning or an afternoon available for project work. High school students have one half of a day in their schedule allocated for coming to the university to collaborate with university students. All participants negotiate common available time to meet and work on projects.

In this section we describe three projects on which students worked over the past three years since the scheme has been introduced. Australian company, Tenix Defence sponsored all three projects. Each project had two well defined levels with tasks associated with each level; a basic level which was suitable for year 12 high school students and an advanced level suitable for the year 4 university students working on their final year project. However, the tasks were interlinked and all students had to closely collaborate in order to make sure the project progressed according to the schedule. I. Security Camera Control In year 2005 the industry based project was to design and build a stationary video surveillance head with a security camera shown in Figure 3. It was an outdoor device with 4 infra-red (IR) sensors aiming to detect an intruder. Each IR sensor monitored 900 of space angle, i.e. one quadrant. In the event an intruder was detected the camera would be turned around to the quadrant where an intruder was detected and would transmit a video signal to the dedicated computer. At the same time

978-1-4244-1970-8/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE October 22 – 25, 2008, Saratoga Springs, NY 38th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference T4C-8

Session T4C the surveillance head would emit a warning message to the intruder to leave the area. The additional, advanced level task to be accomplished by the university students only, was to process the video input signal in order to distinguish if the detected moving object is a human or not in order to emit a warning message only in the case when a human intruder is detected. Figure 3 shows 4 IR sensors with a video camera mounted on a box with electronics. Underneath the box is a speaker that would broadcast the warning message.

FIGURE 4 YEAR 2006 PROJECT – MOBILE VIDEO SURVEILLANCE UNIT

FIGURE 3 YEAR 2005 PROJECT – SECURITY CAMERA CONTROL

II. Mobile Semi-Intelligent Video Surveillance Unit The year 2006 project was an extension of the previous year project where the stationary video surveillance head with a security camera was integrated with a mobile platform as shown in Figure 4. The purpose of this project was to “patrol” a designated area. For this, the additional tasks were implemented like following a path, object avoidance, falling avoidance, etc. The university students had an additional high level task to research and implement advanced techniques for object recognition. III. Airship Telemetry In year 2007 the project involved building an airship for indoor aerial surveillance. The airship, shown in Figure 5 had to be manually controllable from a console on the ground. High school students used Lego NXT controller to accomplish this task.

FIGURE 5 YEAR 2007 PROJECT – AIRSHIP TELEMETRY

The university students had also to develop autonomous operation of the airship. For this purpose, they used LabVIEW programming language to design and implement a sophisticated graphical user interface (GUI) shown in Figure 6. The GUI incorporated a video feed from an onboard camera. Students working on this project participated in a number of events aiming to promote careers in engineering. They presented airship to more than 3500 students of all ages who attended these events. Figure 7 is a photo taken during one such promotional event.


Session T4C

FIGURE 6 AIRSHIP GUI

The project was nominated to be presented and to compete for the Institution of Engineering and Technology Australia (IET) Rex Johns Student Presentation Prize. The Prize is awarded to an engineering student for excellence in the presentation of his/her final year project. The project won the Prize in 2007 and competed in the 2008 Regional Final of the South Pacific Present Around the World Competition (SP-PAW) held in Melbourne, Australia in April 2008. This competition has the same aim as the Rex Johns Student Presentation Prize competition and the winner is awarded with a nomination to compete at international level. The success of this project also attracted media attention and was reported on Australian Channel 10 News [4].

FIGURE 7 ENGINEERING CAREER PROMOTION EVENT

PRACTICES OF OTHERS The majority of the projects reviewed [6-13] has a connotation of service learning combined with an outreach component similarly to the UniSA projects discussed in this paper. All of them have a design component, clearly a necessary motivating aspect for high school students, and equally for university students to demonstrate their technical skills and the opportunity to develop people skills in the

cooperation with their high school and industry partners. Each of the examples described below has its slightly different distinctive features. The MATES Mentoring Project [5] deals with 12-13 year students who have potential to succeed in tertiary education and operates as a combination of mentoring and tutoring leads to the development of leadership and self management skills. In a technology based project at the University of Arizona [6] high school students increase the technology awareness and realize their opportunities in higher education in the area of information technology services within the community. Underrepresented high school students create change by projects within their communities together with the leader students from the University of North Caroline in the scheme of North Carolina Wilmington Need to Lead N2L [7] in projects sponsored by major businesses. Accompanying workshops for pupils are focused on public speaking, team work, creative thinking, problem solving, fundraising and leadership. Applied Design Engineering Project Teams ADEPT [8] consisting of local school teachers and students, graduate students, university faculty and advanced undergraduates in math and science majors engage middle and high school students in doing mathematics and science through openended engineering projects that provide attractive alternative to pressure bearing curriculum components. The Y-Plan Project in West Oakland developed understanding of high school students of urban planning and design to create better parkland in the vicinity of their school [9]. It involved the University graduate student mentors over 10 weeks. It has won the 2003 Youth Architecture Award for outstanding work engaging young adults in the urban environment. The University of Buenos Aires in Argentina has implemented an automatic control project [10] to integrate researchers, the faculty and students at different levels to work in multidisciplinary teams on real technological problems integrating automation, renewable energy and informatics, such as control of movement of a solar panel. An interesting example of a cooperative effort among Manitoba high schools, the Manitoba Satellite Interest Group, the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Manitoba and numerous aerospace industry partners is the WinCube satellite project [11]. High school students have the opportunity to be involved in the design, construction, and launching a picosatellite. In addition to defined educational goals, pupils are challenged in the field of science and technology. They are mentored by aerospace industry and university students. A team consisting of 3 university students, 2 high students, their teacher and university students conducted a microgravity project with a research component and an outreach component to promote mathematics and science to economically disadvantaged schools [11]. In the outreach component high school students mentored by university


Session T4C students designed their microgravity projects and competed in an open competition. Since 2000, the Earthquake Engineering Centre at the University of Bristol has been running an international competition IDEERS (Introducing and Demonstrating Earthquake Engineering Research in Schools) for students to design earthquake resistant buildings [13]. Over a thousand of students aged between 12 and 25 from around the world built and tested their models. The competitions educate the general public about the need for good engineering solutions. Both students and academics have the opportunity to be engaged in public awareness activities. In summary, there is a number of initiatives worldwide involving collaboration between industry, university students and high school students. However, the number of these schemes is relatively low and hopefully will increase in the future because of the great benefits that these projects provide to all participants.

[3]

Sprok, Andrew, Dansie, Brenton, Nedic, Zorica, Göl, Özdemir and Nafalski, Andrew, Robotics Peer Mentoring (RPM) Program in high schools, Proceedings of UNESCO International Centre for Engineering Education 4th Asia-Pacific Forum on Engineering and Technology Education, Bangkok, Tailand, pp. 161-164, 26-29 September 2005.

[4]

UniSA 10 News Airship Telemetry Blimp (2007), YouTube video clip, Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdxchucTtT4, accessed on 15 March 2008.

[5]

Mentoring opportunities and projects (2008), The University of Auckland, Available from http://www.auckland.ac.nz/uoa, accessed on 12 May 2008.

[6]

UA undergrads mentor high school students (2006), The University of Arizona, Eller College of Management, Available at http:///www.eller.arizona.edu/news/2006/04/04, accessed on 12 May 2008.

[7]

UNC Wilmington equips underrepresented high school students to implement service projects (2008), University of North Caroline, Available at http://appserv02.uncw.edu/artview.aspx?id=2355, accessed on 12 May 2008.

CONCLUSIONS

[8]

Applied design engineering project teams ADEPT (2007), University of California Berkeley, Available at http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/cues/pep/adeptundergradtutorapp.pdf, accessed on 14 May 2008.

[9]

Y-plan interactive university project (2003), University of California Berkeley, Available at http://iu.berkeley.edu/IU/June 2003Homepage, accessed on 13 May 2008.

In this paper we presented Industry Sponsored Projects, a program that has been running at UniSA for the last three years, where a local company sponsors and supervises final year engineering projects with an involvement of high school students. All projects have been successfully completed on time. The program particularly gave the high school students enough experience and flavor of working in an engineering discipline to be able to make an informed decision about their future career choice. The university students benefited by gaining supervisory experience which was sometime challenging as their expectations from younger students were often unrealistic. Overall, the experiences are very positive and benefits for all involved are multifold. However, the program requires significant resources, particularly extensive effort and time of university and industry supervisors and therefore has only been running on a small scale mainly thanks to Tenix Defense Company and their staff commitment to the program. Nevertheless, we hope the program may inspire other universities to introduce similar schemes. REFERENCES [1]

Learn and Serve America (2008), National and Community Service, Available from: http://www.learnandserve.gov/, accessed on 22 February 2008.

[2]

Nedic, Zorica, Dansie Brenton and Nafalski, Andrew, Effectiveness of robotics peer mentoring program for raising interest in engineering, science and technology, Proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering Education and Research - Progress Through Partnership, Bouzov Castle, Czech Republic, (R Farana et al. Eds), pp. 659-667, 2004.

[10] Denazis, Julia, Ferreira, Fabiana, Schottlended, Roberto, Ruggeri, Alejandro, Orlandelli, Carlos, Calvani, Adrian, Sciolla, Mariano, An innovative project on integrating university and high school in a multidisciplinary engineering approach, Proceedings of the 32nd ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Boston, USA, pp.F2C5, 2002. [11] Cieszecki, Jeff, Wagener, Stefan, The WinCube Satellite project Manitoba high school students construction and launching picosatellite and high altitude balloon payloads (2007), Manitoba Satellite Interest Group, Available at http://www.msig.ca/files/74.pdf, accessed on 12 May 2008. [12] Student projects (2007), Aeronautics and Astronautics, The University of Washington, College of Engineering, Available at http://aa.washington.edu/research/student_projects.html, accessed on 12 May 2008. [13] The Introducing and Demonstrating Earthquake Engineering in Schools I DEERS project (2008), Bristol University, UK, Available at http://www.bristol.ac.uk/2008/212027945224.html, accessed on 12 May 2008.

AUTHOR INFORMATION Andrew Nafalski Professor, School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of South Australia, [email protected] Zorica Nedic, Senior Lecturer, School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of South Australia, [email protected]
