About the NSF grant

Reengineering Makes Industry Meaningful In College

The National Science Foundation grant IVCC received is supporting an innovative curriculum project that will immerse engineering design, electronics and manufacturing students in reengineering over the entire course of their two-year programs.

The curriculum in the engineering design and electronics programs is being rewritten around the Making Industry Meaningful In College or MIMIC project. The objective is to introduce freshmen to reengineering in their first semester technical courses, where they analyze and recommend improvements on projects previously designed by MIMIC student teams. The project culminates in the fourth semester, when the technical students are joined by business students and form the MIMIC teams or “companies,” which manufacture, market and sell the products.

The entrepreneurial MIMIC portion of the project, scheduled in the fourth semester, is a well-established concept at the college. Since 1995, student teams composed of technical and business students have been designing, manufacturing and marketing a product, all in the course of one semester. By making the MIMIC project the focal point of the two-year technical programs, the students are gaining valuable reengineering experience and have time to design more viable products. The grant is also supporting MIMIC-related activities and initiatives designed to improve the performance of technical students and to increase the interest of high school students in technical careers.