Training digital development skills for engineers: Experience from student projects in forest industry

Abstract

Today, employers impose new requirements on graduates of higher engineering education institutions: a graduate must be able to learn quickly in the workplace and easily master modern production equipment. Educational programs of higher institutions do not always keep up with the development of modern technology, and laboratory equipment does not always correspond to the modern level. The article presents the Petrozavodsk State University's experience in involving students of engineering and natural science major in the project activities connected with the creation of educational laboratory equipment with microcontroller control as part of their coursework and final papers. During this pedagogical experiment, the influence of non-IT students' work on three projects related to solving IT problems in the forestry industry on their preparation for future professional activities was studied. The task of this student's projects work was not so much to update the laboratory fleet, as to teach students through designing and creating real products within the framework of student projects and to study the impact of project activities on the overall learning outcomes of the involved students. As a result of project activity students not only gained new knowledge and mastered new competences, but gained skills of teamwork and interaction in the team, and also intensified their interest in learning activities in the main disciplines of their major, realizing the ways of applying the knowledge gained at the university to solve real engineering problems.