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Making Industry Meaningful in College

Dorene Perez, Jim Gibson, Rose Marie Lynch Illinois Valley Community College

Making Industry Meaningful in College (MIMIC) is an innovative, multidisciplinary curriculum project that places students from engineering design, electronics, and business into entrepreneurial teams to select, design, prototype, manufacture, and market a product. Its purpose is to provide students with opportunities to implement and sharpen their technical and other critical workplace skills in a simulated industrial setting. Pioneered at a comprehensive community college, MIMIC is adaptable to a variety of disciplines and to a variety of school settings from high school through university.

The origin of the MIMIC concept

In 1995, the engineering design instructor and a business instructor at Illinois Valley Community College developed a creative plan to provide their students with workplace experiences. As a project in one of their courses, the instructors integrated their students into teams to develop, produce and sell a product. The design and business courses were scheduled to allow the student teams, called “companies,” a common meeting time and to facilitate special training in such areas as group dynamics and communication. Student teams simulated an industrial environment not only by designing, producing and marketing a product, but also by participating in the types of communication situations required in the workplace.

In its first year, MIMIC received a Connections Award for Innovative Curriculum from the Illinois State Board of Education.

The MIMIC project today

In the years since MIMIC’s successful debut, both the technical side and the business side of the project have been expanded, bringing membership on the student teams closer to an industrial setting. On the technical side, electronics students have been added to the program. On the business side, a MIMIC business course has been developed as a capstone for students in Associate in Applied Science degree programs in marketing, accounting, management, computer systems and information systems. For the engineering and electronics students, MIMIC continues to be a project within one of their classes.

The classes currently participating in MIMIC are: • CAD 2208 – Engineering Design Projects, a capstone course in engineering, which enables students to use their skills to design products for production and supervise production as project managers.

Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering

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Gibson, J., & Perez, D., & Lynch, R. M. (2004, June), Making Industry Meaningful In College Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--12866