When
Dr. Sema Alptekin
began planning how to teach a graduate course, "Advanced Topics in Simulation," for California Polytechnic State University's industrial and manufacturing engineering program, she wanted to design the course to fit the school's "learn by doing" principle. Cal Poly claims its students take more laboratory courses than students at any other engineering school in the nation. In other words, they not only learn theory, they practice it on numerous engineering management applications. She wanted to give her students a real problem and real data.
Because she was new both at Cal Poly and in California, Alptekin contacted an old colleague, Dr. Ali Kiran, president of Kiran & Associates (San Diego, CA),
who consults with California industry on simulation and scheduling issues. Kiran pointed her to Mike Fahner at Siemens Solar Industries.
Fahner, as it turned out, was enthusiastic about collaborating with Cal Poly on this project, because its students and faculty could buy him resources and expertise that he couldn't otherwise muster. He was also eager to work with Cal Poly because of the reputation of its accredited engineering and business programs. SSI was committed to sustaining a relationship with a local university with talented faculty and students.
No money or compensation was exchanged. SSI would provide technical information and project management, while Cal Poly graduate students would contribute the systems-analysis expertise and put in the time needed to set up and perform the actual computer simulations. The relationship was a cooperative exchange of information and experiences from which both parties benefited.
The two parties decided to hold weekly teleconference meetings, an
d the students would have to produce periodic progress reports. The 16 students were divided into four project groups, each focusing on one specific part of the system.
The students accomplished a lot in a 10-week quarter. In fact, SSI's experience contradicts the common wisdom, widely believed in industry, that students take longer than professionals to complete projects. Everyone was happy at the end of the clean-room project. The students gained confidence in using simulation as a tool to solve real problems. Fahner and SSI obtained a number of helpful simulation results that would otherwise have taken longer to achieve. And Alptekin had succeeded in making her course more interesting and more meaningful by including industrial projects in an academic setting.
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Learn By Doing
