Development and Technical Experience of Plastic Injection Machine for STEAM Education

Traditional technical education exhibitions for high-school or elementary school students used static posters, demo tools or oral presentation ways to introduce different kinds of professional technical education. For Mechanical engineering and product design fields, limits by learning space, budget, safety issues that hadn’t similar industrial level machines for them to operate and experience those real-world technologies. Normally those exhibition results did not as their prediction, still had a gap between schools and industries. For solving this issue, we introduced how to implement an industrial level plastic injection machine to be education applications for STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics). By a small machine structure and simple UI/UX design of HMI (Human-Machine-Interface) control panel indication, the visitors could operate the table type plastic injection machine and produces toys by themselves via play experience. This innovation STEAM teaching model could enhance learning interesting and motivation for younger students before them entrance the technical colleges or universities, let them understand the latest technology trends and assist them chose appropriate development fields and found career plan directions in the future.