A Summer Immersive Program for Global Engineering Education with Focus on 3D Design and Structural Analyses

As the world is becoming smaller and more and more connected in all levels, future engineers need to be trained to work in more global, adaptable, and teamwork environments where engineers from different cultures and disciplines work together and solve problems. In this paper, we present a summer immersive program that we ran to meet this need. Our program drew about 40 undergraduate students from universities from three different countries with various engineering disciplines including mechanical, industrial, civil, mechatronics, naval architecture and ocean engineering, and automotive engineering. These universities were Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) in the United States, Tongmyong University (TU) in South Korea, and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) in Malaysia. This program ran for two weeks in July 2017 (and August 2016) at TU in Busan, S. Korea. The program content was engineering design and analysis methods using 3D modeling that have applications to various disciplines. We used wellknown engineering design and structure analysis tools, CATIA and ABAQUS, respectively. In the first part of the program, students learned the methods and tools using lectures and individual/group projects, while in the second part students grouped into 11 teams and each team defined its own final project problem, divided work among its members, applied the first part knowledge to the problem and made a team presentation on its findings at the end of the two-week program. Teams were formed such that students experienced diversity and global nature with respect to their origins, disciplines, and genders. Students in the same teams mostly shared the same dorm rooms for teamwork and cultural exchanges. Students toured global industry plants and visited cultural sites. An invited expert on the naval architecture design and ocean engineering field presented real case studies to students. The post assessment shows that students were very pleased with the program and we plan to run the program again in summer 2018. In this paper, we will present our program content and schedule, sample team final projects, and program assessment outcome, and share experiences we gained from our global engineering education through this summer program.