Dassault Systèmes is proud to support the education of tomorrow’s engineers, scientists, doctors, and mathematicians. As you may be aware, we have a strong history of supporting education. On June 13, Dassault Systèmes will be presenting at a workshop held by the American Society for Engineering Education in Seattle, Washington.
The workshop is for teachers working in grades K-12, as well as educators who teach engineering. It will focus on encouraging students to explore engineering as a future career option. The teachers in attendance will learn how to incorporate and promote engineering in their lesson plans.
In addition to working with ASEE, Dassault Systèmes has created many other educational partnerships for STEM education. At the K-12 level, we have partnered with singer Will.i.am’s i.am.angel foundation. And each summer we provide STEM teachers an opportunity to work in our offices and learn from STEM practitioners to help develop lesson plans.
Why would a company like Dassault Systèmes be so invested in education and interested in supporting groups such as ASEE? Because today’s students are the innovators of tomorrow. Dassault Systèmes takes pride in fostering scientific curiosity at all ages by providing students with the opportunity to learn about the latest 3D and PLM technology. By supporting early exposure to technology at the kindergarten level and encouraging cutting-edge student projects in the older grades, we promote the advancement of STEM education.
With so many ways to support education, we asked Xavier Fouger, the Director of Dassault Systèmes Global Academic Programs, a few questions to explain why the company chooses to emphasize ASEE.
Q. Dassault Systèmes is a partner of ASEE and has participated in its conference for a number of years – why is this organization a focus for us?
A. ASEE is unique worldwide in gathering such a large number of educators and engineering education leaders. These professionals are critical relays of our actions to promote the modern engineering education from which our customers in the industry expect to get the talent to make them more competitive.
Those educators who join ASEE have a genuine interest in advancing both education practices and content. We enjoy ASEE as a platform where we can meet with this population to disseminate the digital education practices that reflect the state of the art of engineering as we define it, together with our industry customers. Examples of such practices are new ways to improve collective innovation, the development of interdisciplinary skills and the knowledge of emerging technologies such as Internet of Things (IOT), Systems Engineering, integral design, crowd-based, distant and social engineering collaboration.
This same group is also an ideal set of people with whom we can discuss, advance and test new types of processes which enhance the performances of the educational process itself. Examples of such processes are project-based learning, MOOCs, flipped-classrooms, flipped-capstone, etc.
Q. ASEE has a number of programs – are there any that stand out for you?
A. There are three recent ASEE activities that we found extremely relevant.
One was conducted by their corporate interest group and related to the identification of the attributes of a global engineer. This study touches a critical subject on how to internationalize curricula to better enable new graduates to successfully interact with foreign peers in the context of global cooperation.
A second key ASEE production is the study they run for the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled Transforming Undergraduate Education in Engineering (TUEE). The first phase of this study gathered a number of large employers in an effort to identify critical Knowledge Skills and Abilities (KSA) expected from a new graduate. To develop the most important of those KSAs, the very digital practices that we study are essential enablers.
A third working theme at ASEE is about using the 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering that are defined by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) as a context in which various engineering disciplines can be placed to gain more attractiveness in the eyes of students. We believe that this approach makes a difference in re-energizing engineering studies and increasing student enrollment.
Q. There is so much written about the importance of bringing diversity into STEM. How does our participation in ASEE assist with that?
There are two dimensions in this issue: One is the need to improve a pipeline of young people motivated for engineering studies. The second is one specific manner to increase this pipeline by attracting under-represented segments of the population in engineering studies. To respond to those challenges, engineering must be made more appealing to high-school students and especially to woman. Here again ASEE provides us with a marvelous platform to advance this subject. Indeed, 2015 marks the 9th year in a row of Dassault Systèmes being the presenting sponsor of ASEE’s K12 workshops. K12 Educators attending these workshops are extremely innovation-ready and represent a sort of avant-garde in moving secondary education forward. This is why we are so pleased to meet them on a yearly basis, to share with them the latest innovations in digital-based education, to understand from them how they promote diversity in their practice and to share with them all the experiences we could gather in combining our technologies with such practices on a worldwide basis.
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