NKU-Mazak Corp. Joint Senior Project Program

Mazak in cooperation with NKU Engineering Technology is carrying an innovative training program aimed to provide students with ‘hands-on’ industrial experience, as part of graduation requirements. This innovative learning experience incorporates many elements of the case method in experiential learning. The advantages for this university-industry joint effort are: 1. The resources available to students and the hand on experience provided to the students in the Mazak facility cannot be emulated in school, even in the laboratory type classes. 2. From the students’ side there is no additional cost involved as the project is fully sponsored by Mazak. Eighteen students have been assigned to nine different industrial projects ranging from product improvement to optimization of manufacturing processes. Example of the project titles are: Automatic Assembly of Dangerous Materials, Robot Electrical Test Box for CNC Machines, etc. Using data obtained from surveys conducted duration the semester we will assess student’s performance and make the necessary adjustments to improve the program. Introduction Mazak is the global leader in the design and manufacture of highly productive CNC machine tools and automation systems established in Northern Kentucky since 1974, and has spent the past several decades continuously improving its manufacturing operations and enhancing its technology to be able to immediately address its customers’ changing needs. Founded in 1968, Northern Kentucky University (NKU) is a metropolitan university with 16,000 students, located in Highland Heights, KY, in the greater Cincinnati area. NKU currently offers Bachelors of Science degrees in Engineering Technology (Electronics EET and Mechanical and Manufacturing MMET), with the support of local industry, who provide most of the students with Co-op opportunities. Several efforts have been made to design new learning methods in order to train novice technology professionals and engineers about the production concepts in diverse manufacturing areas as well as teaching students in novel ways to transfer real world applications to educational class [1]. What makes this university-industry cooperation novel is that it is a part of our academic program, being taught under NKU faculty and Mazak management supervision, at their facility. The students will utilize all knowledge acquired through the program and as a culminating effort towards graduation they will submit a senior project to be built and tested on Mazak site. The advantages for this university-industry joint effort are: 1. The resources available to students and the hand on experience provided to the students in the Mazak facility cannot be emulated in school, even with the capital cost expenditure P ge 24936.2 made by schools in order to obtain and maintain laboratory environments that reflect the modern industrial facility [2]. 2. From the students’ side there is no additional cost involved as the project is fully sponsored by Mazak. 3. Mazak benefits from this program by the opportunity of their employees interact with highly academically trained students, fully dedicated to experimental initiatives. According to Todd et al. [3], it is essential to keep in mind that industry is an important customer of engineering education. Ignoring this relationship has produced graduates that often fail to meet the changing needs of industry. One of the objectives of cooperation with our industrial partners in senior projects is to be able to receive feedback from our industrial customers. Faculty from Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering Technology at Northern Kentucky University are determined to improve the capstone project course to make one of its central objectives to undertake projects that are essential to our industrial partner’s needs. These projects are intended to involve both product and process design activities. Multidisciplinary teams of students are selected and taught a structured development approach to produce typical industrial deliverables. These deliverables include a functional specification, product and process design, prototype, and first production sample. The Training Program as an Experiential Learning We believe that experience should be a central component of the educational process [4]. For an experience to be educational, it must possess continuity and interaction. Continuity refers an “experience chain,” where one experience leads to additional experiences prompting an individual to learn more [5]. Experiential learning is a philosophy of learning which encompasses the traditional learning theories but emphasizes that the source of the learning material can be from experience, as opposed to the more traditional view of classroom and lectures [6]. This program incorporates many elements of the case method in experiential learning [7], which have been largely used in a variety of disciplines. We use four key elements through which a learner cycles in a continuous spiral of learning, as depicted in Figure 1. The four elements are (i) exposure to a concrete experience, (ii) reflection on that experience, (iii) generalization of the experience and formation of abstract concepts based on the generalization, and (iv) application of these concepts to the concrete experience as proposed by Kolb [8].