Engineering students develop improvement proposals for private sector companies
SANTO DOMINGO. – Triple helix collaboration positively impacts the productive development of a country, with this premise the Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo (INTEC) developed the first edition of its program “LearningFactory”, in which students from different careers of their Engineering Area They created projects of interest to respond to the problems of the business sector.
Such was the success of the first call, in which six companies participated Accumed, BioNuclear, Eaton, Macrotech, Grupo Ramos and Mercasid, and 26 final students of Electrical, Industrial, Mechatronics, Software and Cybersecurity Engineering, for which the university has already started the second call.
During an informative talk about the program aimed at students in the Engineering Area Sarah Ferrua, term student Industrial engineer, recounted the experiences he had with his team in the first round of Learning Factory, one of the first teams in the program that collaborated with the company Grupo Ramos.
Their team, of which they were part Marcel De La Cruz, Ismerly Montero y José González, proposed a web tool for calculating personnel requirements for company branches in Hypermarket and Market formats, focused on the Deli, Fruits and Vegetables, Butchery and Cashier areas.
“Learning Factory is an experience that teaches you two main things: how to coexist in a project where they are not people you know and how to interact with a company in a real problem,” he said.
Luis Heredia, Omar Fulcar y Hilary Mena worked on a proposed preventive maintenance plan for the Mercasid corn production plant, based on a loss reduction approach through planning and early detection of failures.
In the case of Macrotech, a company that provides comprehensive services in the Health sector, students Kevin Joa, Omar Núñez, Steven Martínez, Fabiola Acevedo, Fernando Rodríguez y Camila De Los Santos propose the development of a mobile application that allows collect, store y to show through a user interface the data generated by different wireless technology digital medical devices.
By collaborating with AccuMED, a medical device manufacturing company, students Lourdes Lizardo, Venecia Solis, Crismeily Feliz and Stefany Ruiz, sought to reduce material losses, deterioration of dies and downtime in the process of cutting synthetic fabric by welding. radio frequency performed by the Thermex Thermatron RF Welding team.
During his visit to INTEC, Matt Parkinson director of the Learning Factory of the Engineering Area for the penn state university, United States for the informative talk, the teacher recalled the reason for the program. “The experience of carrying out the project prepares you for the industry and for you to learn to work with people,” said the teacher.
In his speech, Parkinson recalled that the Penn State University Learning Factory is the largest client-sponsored multidisciplinary design program in the world. “We lead about 400 students and 250 projects each year,” she said, of which he explained that 95% include at least two disciplines and 65% three disciplines. They hope that through this pioneering project in the country, ties between the industry and the university will be strengthened.
During the informative talk about Learning Factory Luis Toirac, a professor in the Engineering Area who coordinates the program, addressed the stages of project development that range from recruiting projects to presenting the companies' results. In turn, they shared the link to register for the program, which is available on the INTEC web portal.
This program was conceived at Penn State University, United States, in 1994, and has completed more than 2,752 projects for more than 620 sponsors, with nearly 13,000 engineering students involved. Teams of engineering students address business problems in which they use the knowledge and tools acquired at the university, supported and sponsored by companies.
Learning Factory Experiences at Penn State University
In the case of students taking the experience at Penn State University, they share their experiences through audiovisuals that are broadcast on their University's YouTube channel. Such was the case of Joseph Windows, a Mechanical Engineer who is in his fourth year of study, whose project is based on developing a device to measure the effectiveness of shunting in patients with a disease called “Hydris.”
“Making a device that can help others in the operating room seems like a cool challenge, and although it's a very iterative (repetitive) process, we're confident we'll have a really good product at the end of this,” Windows shared.
Tiffanie Leung, Penn State Architecture Residency artist, said, “The most rewarding thing has always been the process, the trials and tribulations of finding yourself. I think Learning Factory has really helped me bond with the people and community involved here. “Many amazing colleagues have helped me manage all the machines and facilitate and foster a truly growing learning environment.”
To register, students can access the link by clicking here https://lf.intec.edu.do/