NSF funds WSU researcher's educational e-learning project for sustainable design and manufacturing

Kyoung-Yun Kim, Ph.D., assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering, received a $250,000 Cyberinfrastructure Training, Education, Advancement and Mentoring (CI-TEAM) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Kim will develop a collaborative e-learning platform to promote a more diverse, cyberinfrastructure-savvy engineering workforce.

The Sustainable Product Development Collaboratory will teach sustainability principles of product architectural design, manufacturing, assembly and supply chain decisions across a spectrum of active learners, including high school students, university students and practitioners.

"To date, there has been a significant level of grassroots activity for sustainable design and manufacturing," says Kim. "However, engineering programs and manufacturing companies continue to struggle with methods to educate engineers in holistic product and process development with a view of life cycle costs and environmental effects."

Existing educational methods do not capture the interdependencies between product design architecture and life cycle process requirements of product development. The primary goal of this project is to overcome these limitations by incorporating scalable tools as well as flexible, representative models and algorithms in a user-friendly, license-free, Web-based tool.

Secondary and postsecondary educational materials will complement the collaboratory's online component by providing users with a hands-on approach to learning. The project will also consist of evaluation tools to measure how effectively the collaboratory educates students about cyberinfrastructure.

Kim seeks to engage high school and underrepresented college students to foster diversity in the science and engineering workforce. The use of tangible examples - like the effect of three-ring binders on the environment and supply chain costs - are expected to advance students' multi-step problem-solving skills.

"This project will help develop, at a modest cost, new pedagogy for academic institutions to integrate sustainability into engineering curricula, and prepare a skilled workforce that meets the needs of modern industry for sustainable product development," Kim says.

Other researchers involved in the project are industrial and manufacturing engineering faculty Leslie Monplaisir, Ratna Chinnam and Alper Murat from WSU; Karl Haapala, Oregon State University; and Gul Kremer, Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University.