Metal cutting and manufacturing economics project for freshmen

Abstract

This paper describes a practical student experience consisting of a manufacturing laboratory experiment and a team project designed to teach manufacturing concepts to freshmen engineering and engineering technology students at the Old Dominion University. Students learn engineering concepts and skills they will need later. First, students organize into randomly assigned teams with specialized responsibilities for the purpose of calculating the total production time and cost of manufactured parts using turning, drilling, and milling operations. Then, students learn or improve their spreadsheet skills while performing data entry and necessary machining calculations. While these first-year students do not perform any metal cutting themselves, they observe a machine shop technician who performs the operations. Students collect data and take pictures of the operations as they are exposed to rather messy realities of metal cutting. Then, they calculate manufacturing cost of the part. Each team wrote a technical team report to document the manufacturing experience they had. The experiment and the team project are described in sufficient detail to allow easy adoption. Students reflections and informal interviews show that the students are satisfied with the experience and that they highly value gained insights and skills.