Making students industry-ready
- School of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering
As a lecturer, designing fourth-year practical sessions that are relevant, interactive and student-awesome is challenging.
Mr Anthony Higgins needed a practical for his process control students that was all these and more. His students must experience working with real data as they may encounter in an industry situation.
Instead of presenting his students with curated raw data on long spreadsheets (a method that can be, let's face it, a bit dull), Mr Higginson reached out to a unique partner for assistance – the Wits Microbrewery.
The outcome was a way for his students to view data generated from the Wits Microbrewery fermentation bioreactor remotely. Live data from a real-world scenario.
The leverage is ThingSpeak, a cloud-based IoT (Internet of Things) platform. IoT sensors linked to the bioreactor stream data to the students’ smart devices. They remotely access live bioreactor data, enabling them to monitor the progress of the reaction in real-time, just as they would in an industrial setting.
Real-time data is more interactive than a curated dataset. Also, real-time data isn’t perfect, with background noise, missing data points and inaccuracies. Mr Higginson’s students can practice analysing real data with real data issues. You could think of it as a surgical resident practising their surgery skills on a simulator versus a patient. There is no match for a real-life situation.
Mr Higginson’s students have an advantage, making them one-step closer to industry-employable.
Read more about Mr Higginson’s innovative laboratory practical here.