Preparing students for the workforce

Transition from academic studies to life as a professional is one of the most challenging and important roles in educating students. Students spend most of their academic life learning through completion of assignment work, yet will be expected to work as a member of a team in industry. The skills they will require are more diverse than technical skills, particularly communication, how to manage a project, and team work. This paper discusses the significance of an industry related project to student learning and commitment. Discussion of the difficulties experienced by students is also covered. One of the main outcomes of the project was the positive response from students and their increased awareness of critical non technical issues that make a project successful. One final goal of this paper is to draw attention to autonomous robots as a source of project work for programmers, hardware designers, artificial intelligence developers, and researchers.