Workshops

Each year the ISTE community shares transdisciplinary engineering topics and practices through small group, hands-on workshops. Held on July 5th, the day before the regular conference sessions, these workshops are a wonderful way to share insights as colleagues in informal sessions.

The workshops are 2 to 4 hours, free of charge for conference attendees, with no more than 40 people (sometimes as few as 10 people). This year three workshops shown below, will be held on the afternoon of Tuesday, July 5th, prior to the Welcome Reception.

Additionally, engineering experiments will be held during parallel sessions on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, July 6-8, focused on model-based engineering, interactive simulation, and teamwork experiments. Please sign up for these teamwork experiments at the registration desk.

1. Transdisciplinary Framework for Virtual Engineering Practices from Design to Course Deployment

(Room E51-145)

Francisco Tamayo and Federico Trigos
Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico

In this workshop, participants will comprehend a transdisciplinary framework to develop university engineering practices, with hands-on experience an example of a Transdisciplinary Virtual Reality University Engineering Practice from the design step all the way to student field implementation.

Participants will discuss the appropriateness of this framework in their own field and will discuss regarding the potential impact of this transdisciplinary framework in the future of engineering education.

3. Boundary crossing and boundary objects in product and production development

(Room E51-149)

Daniel Hussmo, Jönköping University, Sweden

Managing specialized knowledge across boundaries is a key challenge for today’s manufacturing companies. Companies need ability to swiftly adapt their products and production systems to new and quickly changing requirements. Integration and boundaries between product and production development addressed from a knowledge perspective are the focus of workshop. This session aims at exploring how engineers dealing with product and production development devise and use means and mediators to support boundary-crossing knowledge integration in product and production development. A mean to support knowledge integration is through boundary objects, a potential concept still underdeveloped in product and production development. Boundary objects are means of representing, learning about, or transforming knowledge to deal with the consequences of differences and dependencies at a boundary between two specialized knowledge domains. Boundary objects are contextual, i.e., they are not effective in all contexts and depend on the boundary that they need to deal with. It is well known that there is varying complexity at a boundary which requires boundary objects with different characteristics to support knowledge integration across those boundaries.

In this workshop we delve into design and use of boundary objects to support boundary crossing and knowledge integration between product and production development. The workshop is based on presentation of theory and following discussions pertaining to the areas described earlier. The aim is that we together can gain a better understanding of the boundaries that need to be crossed when working trans-disciplinary between product development and production and how boundary objects can be used to cross these.

2. Cancelled: Natural Intelligence: A Holistic Approach to Engineering

Shuichi Fukuda, Keio University, Japan

This workshop has been cancelled. Please consider one of the three workshops which are running concurrently and available from 1pm on Tuesday, July 5th.

4. Teaching and assessing systems thinking in undergraduate engineering education
(Room E51-151)

Rea Lavi, MIT, USA

Quality education in undergraduate engineering must include the development of systems thinking for design and problem-solving. Lecturers and instructors require practical and effective methods for fostering and assessing students’ systems thinking, but many institutions and curricula are still short of facilitating this goal. In this workshop, participants will practice a framework for the development of systems thinking which is suitable for early-years undergraduate students. This framework can be applied to almost any technological system and be used for both fostering and assessing students’ systems thinking. From September 2020 to present, the framework has been implemented successfully in first- and second-year undergraduate engineering classes. Key findings and examples from these implementations will be presented to workshop participants.

Work will be mostly carried out in small teams formed around discipline or systems of interest. Most of the workshop time will be active, including collaboration, presentation, discussion, and reflection. Participants will leave the workshop with the following:

An easy-to-follow template for designing your own systems thinking assignments
Your own systems thinking assignment for students
Responses and feedback from other participants about your assignment