Towards A STEAM Underpinned Industrial Digitalisation Curriculum

Abstract

This article reports on an innovative approach for designing a STEAM curriculum aimed at giving graduates the necessary skills to meet the challenges set out by onset of the Fourth Industrial revolution (ID 4.0: Industrial Digitalisation). This curriculum has been developed as part of a hefce (Higher Education Funding Council, UK) funded project at the University of Lincoln, UK. Author/Artist Bio Kamaran Fathulla is a senior lecturer in Industrial Digitalisation at the University of Lincoln, UK. Kamaran has a PhD in visual knowledge representation from the University of Salford, UK. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. This article is available in The STEAM Journal: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol3/iss2/9 The Challenge: 21 Century Skills Kamaran Fathulla The World Economic Forum (WEF, 2016) report, The Future of Jobs, predicted that many skills currently deemed important may no longer be relevant by 2020. Almost half of the knowledge that students obtain from schools now will also be outdated by the same year. The pace of world change is so rapid that the jobs of tomorrow might not yet have been imagined (Immerman. 2011). In the last 20 years, digitalisation technologies have completely transformed what is possible. Given this pace of change, educators can only hypothesise what newly invented jobs will exist 20 years from now. Therefore, education should not be solely the ingestion of information, but the development of skills so students can adapt to an uncertain world. Traditional systems of teaching and learning are not necessarily providing young people with the skills they need to make it in the modern world (Gordon, 2010). What exacerbates the shortage in graduate skills is the dawn of the 4th industrial digitalisation revolution. Industrial Digitalisation 4.0 At its most simple, Industrial digitalisation is the application of digital tools and technologies in all their forms to the value chains of businesses who make things (e.g. automotive and construction) or are operationally asset intensive (e.g. power grids, wind farms etc.). It is the merging between the physical and digital worlds to significantly enhance performance and productivity. There are a variety of supporting industrial digitalisation technologies – e.g. artificial intelligence, ‘Internet of Things’, robotics, 3D printing, and analytics – but fundamentally it’s the integration of these cyber and physical technologies into production and logistics that allows new businesses to form, increase speed to market, integrate 1 Fathulla: STEAM Underpinned Industrial Digitalisation Curriculum