Increasing student enrollments with a demand on instructional resources poses significant challenges when attempting to meet the goal of hands-on experiences in a manufacturing engineering curriculum. The modern manufacturing engineer requires a spectrum of skills and knowledge in materials, manufacturing processes, production engineering, systems, and manufacturing operations used on the plant floor for industry to maintain competitiveness. While much of this knowledge is gained through experience, a strong foundation enables the early career manufacturing engineer to more rapidly gain knowledge and hit the floor running. Hands-on experiences during the training of manufacturing engineers is invaluable to the foundation of manufacturing knowledge. The strategy to accomplish the goal of providing abundant experiential hands-on laboratories with the necessary physical equipment for courses in a manufacturing engineering curriculum is described in this paper.
Daniel J. Cox received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992 in mechanical engineering and his Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees also in mechanical engineering from the University of Florida in 1981 and 1979, respectively. He worked in industry for sixteen years for IBM at their facilities in Boulder, Colorado and Austin, Texas in robotics and automation for manufacturing. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of North Florida in 2001, he was also program manager for the Robotics Research Group at the University of Texas at Austin for three years. In 2016 he became the Founding Chair of Manufacturing Engineering at Georgia Southern University.
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