Integrating Industry 4.0 in engineering education during a global pandemic: Approach and Learning Efficacy

Given the lockdown situation due to the global pandemic in place, teaching and learning hardware-oriented hand-son skills became a major challenge for engineering education. The present study investigates some of the approaches and demonstrates an effective method of teaching modern engineering skills in a simulated environment, such as investigating the Industry 4.0 concept of ‘Warehouse Automation.’ As part of Project-Based Learning, we are using open source software and free services in a six-month online robotics competition with several stages and tasks. This learning activity was implemented among 1880 participants (470 teams) to teach complex engineering concepts from multidisciplinary domains such as - (1) Robot Operating System (ROS) to control two Robotic Arms in a dynamic simulator, (2) Internet of Things protocols such as MQTT and HTTP, and (3) free cloud services to log data in a database and developing an email notifications system. All the necessary resources were provided to the participants along with the troubleshooting guide that was provided via an online discussion forum. After each task performance of teams was recorded and feedback was collected from the participants. All the recorded data was passed through various statistical analyses as a part of the study to assess the effectiveness of this teaching and learning activity. The study further inspects- whether there is a correlation between participants’ performance in the academic-curricular and the competition, and whether more interaction through online-discussion-forum leads to better performance. Finally, the study will help us understand the perception of participants about COVID-19 impact on their performance.