A Comparison Between Different Approaches To Industrially Supported Projects

Engineering and design is a vocational education with the graduates of degrees in these subjects generally being recruited into discipline specific professional roles in industry. One of the key challenges for educators is how best to develop programmes to equip their graduates for the transition from student to industrialist. One approach which can be used is via industrially supported projects. The aim of this paper is to examine the use of whole class industrially supported projects at undergraduate level. The work focuses on the examination of two quite different projects carried out by a cohort of second year mechanical engineering and product design students at a British University. The first project was based around an open healthcare related brief with an end user as the primary industrial contact while the second was a much tighter brief directed by a manufacturer of pneumatic components for the oil and gas industry. The paper discusses some of the practicalities associated with industrial projects, including intellectual property issues and scheduling. We also examine the students’ attitudes to industrial projects. These showed the students demonstrating a real appreciation for this type of work but also highlighted concerns in relation to lack of clarity in the industrial briefs and level of access to the industrial sponsors.