STEM educationDassault Systèmes, Georgia Tech expand STEM education collaboration

Dassault Systèmes the other day announced that the Georgia Institute of Technology will adopt the company’s 3DEXPERIENCE platform for 10,000 users (students and educators), including its range of capabilities in the design authoring, digital manufacturing, collaboration, scientific simulation, and visualization fields. 

The company notes that the announcement comes after nearly twelve years of collaboration, in which Georgia Tech and Dassault Systèmes have partnered to establish an ambitious science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education program. Georgia Tech’s Integrated Product Lifecycle Engineering (IPLE) Laboratory and Dassault Systèmes jointly developed a new pedagogical model to educate tomorrow’s engineers through a cloud-based design and manufacturing infrastructure.

Dassault Systèmes says that several years ago, leaders at Dassault Systèmes and Georgia Tech realized that the future of science, technology, and engineering was collaborative in nature. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a new type of curriculum for STEM in high schools was developed in partnership between Dassault Systèmes and Georgia Tech’s IPLE lab. A STEM-oriented summer camp for high school students, in which participants collaborated on engineering and design problems across large distances, was envisioned and the new curriculum deployed. The first collaborative summer camp, held in 2012, brought together high school students at Georgia Tech and the University of Detroit Mercy. A second, Georgia Tech and Dassault Systèmes-sponsored STEM summer camp was held in 2013 between high school students at Georgia Tech, University of Detroit Mercy, and the University of New Haven, Connecticut.

“Our relationship with Dassault Systèmes has been exceptionally durable and produced substantial outcomes.  We now pave the road for further, broader achievements, especially in student learning educational innovation,” said Prof. Daniel Schrage, IPLE director, Georgia Tech, who helped develop the STEM summer camps and the new educational model used there.

As part of the same vision that created the STEM summer camps, Georgia Tech has recognized that the need for advanced systems engineers is approaching a peak, as more industries compete with smarter products involving more complex systems. At the same time, tens of thousands of engineering professionals are about to retire. To address this potential problem and improve advanced systems engineering education, Georgia Tech’s Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL) has begun leveraging Georgia Tech’s experience with Dassault Systèmes. ASDL, focusing on bringing the concept of an engineering “digital thread” to new learning and working practices, will include in its curriculum new graphic-based analysis and decision making in the engineering of complex systems.

“Industry faces a dramatic need for talent in systems engineering. Our programs are strongly driven by industry cases and we trust that our collaboration will bring new advances in the way complex systems are analyzed and designed,” said Dimitri Mavris, Boeing Professor of Advanced Aerospace Systems Analysis and ASDL Director, Georgia Tech.

“ASDL is one of the top labs in the USA on this topic and they will use Dassault Systèmes’ unique systems engineering capabilities to bring integrated geometric, logical, functional and requirement modeling to tomorrow’s engineers. We and our partners at ASDL and IPLE have heard the need from industry,” said Philippe Forestier, Executive Vice President, Global Affairs, Dassault Systèmes. “Our relationship with Georgia Institute of Technology is a shining example of the way we approach academia by helping transform the learning experience. Together we are bringing more industry realism into curricula and addressing the entire STEM pipeline to provide industry the employable and competitive workforce it needs.”