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How Experiential Learning Can Prepare Students For The Age Of Automation

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If you visit a White Castle in the coming months, you might see Flippy, a robotic arm, flipping burgers on the grill.

The fast food company first introduced Flippy at a California restaurant in 2018 and planned to slowly introduce the technology at its venues across the country. The Covid-19 pandemic, though, sped up White Castle’s plans because the robotic line cook limits the number of people that need to crowd in a kitchen. The pandemic has accelerated automation in a number of sectors, including fast food, healthcare and hospitality, and polling indicates business leaders are looking for more ways to put automated technology to work.

As an educator, I’m now working to ensure my students are prepared for a world where robots are as commonplace as computers are today. To thrive in the coming age of automation, students will need to excel at skills where humans, for now, have the advantage over machines, such as problem solving and creativity. Those abilities, already critical in many workplaces, will become even more crucial as technology takes on routine jobs. Experiential learning is critical for this effort.

Limits of Automation

A recent article in MIT’S Sloan Management Review cautioned against a rush to automate. The writers, Matt Beane, an assistant professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, and Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford, concluded, “[G]ood people and good techniques remain essential to business results. The people can quickly invent new processes for new problems that crop up, deal with exceptions, and make improvements. And the techniques — combinations of work processes and technology automation — offer improved reliability and capability, allowing managers to reallocate people to more complex work.”

Amazon AMZN , for instance, has yet to find or develop a robot that can locate a product in a warehouse as successfully as a person can. Elon Musk famously had to walk back plans to fully automate Tesla TSLA factories, tweeting, “Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.”

As Amazon and Tesla have discovered, humans are better at innovating and problem solving than robots are. And while we often think of automation as replacing the work of skilled laborers, even engineering analysis that can be learned by rote may be automated through software, leaving only complex cognitive tasks to humans. That’s why it’s critical for our students to excel at thinking outside the box.

More Than Formulas

As educators we have always been focused on instilling critical thinking and problem-solving skills in our students, but all too often, students become fixated on getting through their exams by simply learning how to solve a narrow set of problems they’ve been exposed to in class. While a robot can easily compute a complex equation, it still can’t quickly innovate to overcome challenges.

This semester, I’m teaching a section of senior design in Purdue’s School of Mechanical Engineering. In the class, teams of students work together to bring a new product to life. We open the semester with brainstorming and end it with a competition where the teams present their final prototypes to a panel of judges. The course gives our students a chance to apply what they’ve learned over three years of courses and also develop those “soft skills” they’ll need as they transition to engineering jobs.

Purdue University also administers a co-op program. The more than 1,000 students who participate in the program alternate between taking classes on campus and working at some of the nation’s top companies, including General Electric GE , General Motors GM and Eli Lilly. The combination of classes and work experience prepares students for future employment.

“With its blend of higher learning and real-world practice, co-op education has become a proven way to prepare students for a changing world and challenges growing ever more complex,” Dave McKay, president and CEO of Royal Bank of Canada, told the Society of Human Resource Management.

Studies have found similar benefits to participating in internships and even undergraduate research. A report from the Association of American Colleges & Universities found experiential learning gives students “the capacity for critical thinking and application of knowledge in complex or ambiguous situations and the ability to engage in lifelong learning, including learning in the workplace.”

Experiential learning programs aren’t new, but they should take on increasing importance in the coming years if we want to prepare students for a future when robots might be their coworkers. To ensure success of such programs, industry should also engage in promoting and crafting these efforts. It is not only in the best interest of the students — their future employees — but is necessary to the discovery of innovative solutions to unexpected challenges, as Flippy has proven in the midst of a global pandemic. Textbook-based learning is still critical to the development of a solid technical foundation in engineering, but our students will only succeed if we teach them to translate that knowledge into innovation, an upper hand that humans still have over automation.

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