Industry 4.0 Briefcase: An Innovative Engineering Outreach Project for Professions of the Future

This paper presents an engineering outreach project titled “Industry 4.0 Briefcase” that has been developed to introduce the concept of Industry 4.0 to undergraduate students. The project aims to support participants to become aware of Industry 4.0 related topics such as machine learning, data mining, industrial automation, human-machine interface, and product life cycle, and to stimulate the curiosity of them towards these topics. The scope of the project consists of presentations, experimental applications, observations, individual and collaborative studies, assessment and evaluation practices, e-learning applications, and a social program. The project was conducted as a one- week program at a public university in Turkey with the participation of 18 undergraduate 3rd-year students. Participants consist of students from computer engineering and software engineering departments of the engineering faculties and the business department of the faculty of economics and administrative sciences. Thus, participants of the project had the opportunity to exchange information with students and faculty members from different academic backgrounds. The study utilized the mixed methods approach by performing both quantitative and qualitative measurements. To collect data, mini projects and project evaluation forms were used for quantitative measurements and daily virtual classroom sessions and a general evaluation session (focus group interview) were used for qualitative measurements. The success rates of the participants based on the evaluation of the reports they presented were obtained as 91% in data mining, 95% in industrial automation and human-machine interface, and 89% in machine learning course, respectively. It was observed that the overall satisfaction level of the participants from the project activities was over 95%. These findings were also supported by the qualitative findings as the students indicated their overall satisfaction from the organization of the project and stated that working in teams and attending the social program contributed to developing positive relationships with each other and increasing their success.