“Digital literacy”: Shaping industry 4.0 engineering curriculums via factory pilot-demonstrators

This work describes a joint initiative between PSG-College of technology (Coimbatore, India) and Newcastle University (UK) for the mapping, design, evaluation and roll out of technically rich ‘Digital Manufacturing’ curriculum which has been embraced with a two-fold objective: 1) to prepare final-year Engineering students for real-life industrial environments and 2) to promote the use of digital technologies across manufacturing-intensive Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) that can directly benefit from their application at an engineering, managerial and shop-floor practical levels. The project started by considering both countries' national strategies for Industry 4.0 (MAKE-in India and Made Smarter, UK) to identify those areas marked as strategically critical and mapping them onto existing engineering curriculums across undergraduate engineering degrees.

Based on local industry partners with clearly defined ‘digitalization’ opportunities, four industrial case studies were selected and reproduced inside both University labs in the form of student projects that were made available to all final year mechanical engineering students at both institutions. The resulting pilot projects exhibited the potential to expose undergraduate students to engineering concepts and techniques not currently covered in the taught curriculums, while offering industry a ‘soft landing’ on the use of Industry 4.0 tools which have not yet been embraced, mainly due to the lack of qualified personnel or access to specific technology skillsets, such as 3D printing, Augmented Reality and Digital Twins.