Successes and Challenges in MBSE Education: from High School to Post-Graduate
Abstract:
There is a widely acknowledged need to fundamentally change engineering education by incorporating as early as possible team work and systems thinking. Several attempts have been made to accomplish this through systems engineering education. We described the MS Program in Systems Engineering we have developed and continuously updated in collaboration with Industry at the Institute for Systems Research of the University of Maryland since 1987. We describe lessons learned and challenges that we have faced and still facing. This MSSE Program contains six core courses and enables the students to add a few courses towards specialized applications. We provide examples of the hands-on projects incorporated in the teaching and our more recent efforts to move the teaching more towards a hands-on experience and the challenges faced in these efforts. We describe also a very successful and daring experiment we have implemented since 2010 involving a capstone design course for junior and senior undergraduates from engineering and other disciplines, on hands-on systems engineering projects, which had unexpected and amazing success and popularity with students, and which received laudatory evaluations from recent ABET review committees at Maryland. We describe our most recent efforts in Europe to establish a high school apprenticeship program in this rea and link it to both STEM education and the excitement of the so called “makers society”. This is a collaborative effort between KTH, TUM, NTUA and industry, inspired by the uniquely successful German high school apprenticeship program but focusing on inspiring the younger generations to be “creators” and “makers” and capitalizing on their familiarity with computing and information technology and especially the Internet. We close by describing another ambitious effort we have initiated at Maryland that is attempting to develop an electronic active library of systems engineering education modules broken down to linkable atomic lectures, equipped with navigators (a la Vannevar Bush hypertext cards), allowing individualized instruction and even self-instruction via the Internet, to all interested in the subject from high school students to post graduate practicing and professional engineers and analysts.
Biography:
B.S. in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, 1970; M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University 1971, 1973. Since 1973 with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and the Applied Mathematics Faculty, at the University of Maryland College Park. Since 2000 faculty member in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering. Since 2014 faculty member in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Founding Director of the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) from 1985 to 1991. Since 1991, Founding Director of the Maryland Center for Hybrid Networks (HYNET). Since 2013, Guest Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden. Life Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the SIAM, Fellow of the AAAS and a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Received the 1980 George Axelby Award from the IEEE Control Systems Society, the 2006 Leonard Abraham Prize from the IEEE Communications Society, the 2014 Tage Erlander Guest Professorship from the Swedish Research Council, and a three year (2014-2017) Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study of the Technical University of Munich, Germany. Professor Baras' research interests include automatic control, communication and computing systems and networks, and model-based systems engineering.