What is STAM?

Shared Teaching Materials for Advanced Manufacturing (STAM): What You Should Know

Principle Investigators: Drs. Richard A. Wysk, NC State University, and Gul Kremer, Iowa State University

STAM is a community of instructors and students interested in advanced manufacturing.  The primary focus of STAM is to accelerate the learning of rapidly evolving topics in manufacturing.  By creating a repository of advanced manufacturing modules, STAM will provide advanced manufacturing materials to instructors and students; thereby, reducing the time normally required to bring these topics into the classroom.  It will also reduce students’ expense to take these courses by providing these materials free or at little cost. 

The PIs for this project made an interesting observation where they foresee that researchers have created a “highly organic” set of materials in the form of technical papers/journal articles and research reports that get rapidly shared with other researchers at conferences and research-focused events. Although the ideas behind the developments are protected by patents and invention disclosures, there is a constant focus on getting new ideas out before someone else gets credit for them. Textbooks are a different story in that book authors receive revenues for their efforts, and “protect” their investments. However, this protection can have negative effects on educating college students, and more specifically engineers. We feel that if textbook materials can be made available for instructors at all levels to use and modify as they see fit; the result will be that the content and quality of these materials will increase at a much more rapid pace.  By developing a community of instructors who collaborate using these materials, we feel that the materials will continue to grow and improve making them “organic”.

There are many reasons for giving someone a license to change technical matters, but the best reason is to make the material more dynamic. Publishers have had “custom textbooks” for a decade, but the results have not been very positive. Many technical texts have many topics that go uncovered in courses, but still, find their way into the textbook. Teachers create examples to supplement the text but do not share these examples with the rest of the academic community. Laboratory experiments are frequently developed for specific courses that reinforce learning concepts but are not shared with others except through informal exchanges. This is the gap that we address in STAM.

Early funding for STAM was provided by NSF to conduct three workshops designed to advance or speed-up the transition of research-based advanced manufacturing knowledge into course curriculum in technology and engineering programs. Advanced manufacturing technologies have opened up the realm for new products that only a decade ago were considered unproducible. For example metals, 3D printing has few geometric limitations, which allows engineers to develop mesh-based products. Unfortunately, our educational system that serves to educate the majority of manufacturing technicians and engineers utilizes many of the same curriculum resources for these emerging areas (textbooks, traditional lectures, etc.), frequently creating an unsuitable or inappropriate learning environment for technicians and engineering training.

PIs at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and Iowa State University (ISU) believe in the pedagogical implications of a digital community of practice and are committed to offering resources from all curriculum areas of their colleges in order to provide rich, relevant, and varied content to the educational repository described herein. The opportunities in additive manufacturing and direct digital manufacturing are plentiful, and it is critical that students, at very young ages, be exposed to these opportunities to make informed decisions about their education and career paths. We feel that the focus of STAM will do to teaching what “open architecture” has done for computing. That is, faculty, technicians, and students will all participate in the continued renewal of technical educational materials so that these technologies can grow and the educational materials for new technologies can be put in practice for technical use.  This will benefit engineering by expediting creative teaching and laboratory development across the nation.