Chinese Students of MAI Joined the Engineering Session in Alushta

A modern and efficient university is a unique environment that contributes to the formation of a student's skills and competencies. They can make an effective link in a high-tech industrial enterprise, which activity is aimed at creating promising product samples.

Today, any student at MAI can gain access to knowledge of current digitalization tools, digital transformation, and immerse themselves in the industry paradigm 4.0. To do this, just enough motivation in mastering knowledge. One of the approaches to implement such experience is visiting design sessions and engineering schools - one of which is the Student School-Seminar Alushta-2019.

In MAI the number of international students increases every year. Their introduction to such events will lead to the acquisition of unique knowledge not only on educational courses, but also introduce them the culture and history of modern Russia.

This year, twenty master’s degree students of the joint institute MAI-SJTU from China participate in the Student School-Seminar Alushta-2019, which will be held from May 14 to 23,2019. The main goal of the event is a project work in international teams. To organize such an interaction, introductory classes were held at MAI before the trip. The students familiarized themselves with the basic terminology of digital production, visited the laboratory of additive manufacturing and listened to a course on 3D printing.

Now students must develop four concept projects on the use of three-dimensional printing to create unmanned aerial vehicles. The results obtained by the teams, in the form of electronic models, will be produced at MAI on 3D printers and used for further research and development. The first results will appear in 10 days.

One of the key advantages of this event is cultural exchange and a chance to improve the knowledge of a foreign language.

All participants are formed into four teams, which include both Chinese and Russian students, and the spoken language in the teams is English. And let all students be united by a common language of engineering science, but many participants are faced with the problem of a language barrier. Therefore, all students face a strategic task - to learn to understand each other and communicate in the same language, and at the same time work on the same project.

One of the innovations of this year was the integration of a new course on system engineering into the educational part of the School-Seminar Alushta-2019. It was developed by a Deputy Director of MAI Directorate of Advanced Scientific Programs (DASP) Anzhelika Akaykina, a leading specialist of the DASP Irina Polovina and a Curator of the magistracy MAI-SJTU, Assistant of the Department 101 Alexander Khvan. This program was developed specifically for future concept projects of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The materials and manuals of the leading American technical university Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was taken as a basis.

An important role was given to the study of the concepts of building the product life cycle, ways of managing requirements in aircraft design, configuration management, promising R&D areas and design at a given cost. All students attend lectures and work at seminars in English, which allows to improve the conversational level of a foreign language. In each lecture, time is allotted for solving applied problems associated with their final projects. This allows students, using lecture materials, to shift certain management techniques and project development to their UAV project.