The Tech Column: A Shocking New Way to Teach Skills

WICHITA, Kan. — For now, most folks know about Wichita State University because of its basketball team and, maybe, because of its pizza history. Soon, though, the most public face of the fifth-largest institute of higher learning in Kansas could switch from its Shockers or the first Pizza Hut to innovative advanced manufacturing.

Wichita State officially opened the doors to its new 3DEXPERIENCE Center last Thursday — the product of a partnership between Dassault Systèmes and the school’s National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) that adds more than 120,000 square feet of lab and work space to a burgeoning Innovation Campus. Students can work on practical projects and enter the workforce as experts on the latest tech. Regular folks can walk right in and fiddle around in an expansive makerspace. And the school can pitch itself as far more than an NCAA Tournament regular.

If the Innovation Campus continues to develop as planned, it could provide another blueprint for how to blend higher education with major companies and, of course, practical skills designed for students to land that first (and second, and third) job.

“This center ticks a lot of boxes for people like me,” said Michel Tellier, VP of aerospace and defense for Dassault. “A center like this allows us to create an operational metaphor where that end-to-end capability is actually implemented and in operation. I can bring our customers here and they can understand what technology can do for them — and, more important, they can experiment.”

The center serves plenty of other purposes, too. It provides lab space for aerospace startups to innovate and perhaps develop prototypes. It helps develop a new crop of engineers, some of whom might land at Dassault (or at Airbus, which is a partner and also now has more than 300 employees at work on commercial aircraft products in offices in a neighboring building on campus). Perhaps most important for Wichita State, it provides a physical center for a planned Innovation Campus that will cover more than 120 acres and open the school to a wider audience.

“What we are hoping to be is a center of creativity throughout this entire region,” Wichita State president John Bardo said. “We’re trying to diversify so it’s not only engineering — we want to include business processes, accounting processes, computer science, criminology, we even a group of arts people who are talking about coming.

“It’s about, ‘How do you think differently?’”

So, how did Dassault and Wichita State think differently? A two-hour tour of the building shows off plenty of that thinking and highlights the different stages of the development program. Classrooms and labs are dedicated to ideation, mission planning, and concept of operation; detail definition; reverse engineering; virtual reality; additive manufacturing; and robotics. One windowless room houses what Tellier describes as “the largest high-definition CAVE (Automatic Virtual Environment) in the world.” Another is home to nine ABB industrial robots that comprise “probably the largest (multi-robotic advanced manufacturing space) running right now.”

“This is where engineers can understand the application of what they’re learning as they study, and where they can gain exposure to multiple aspects of the product development process,” Tellier said. “We have a responsibility to help create the next generation of engineers, and having them work on the state-of-the-art is definitely the right thing to do.

“We don’t want to restrict this just to aerospace. What we’re doing here will bring value to other companies that want to understand how products can be innovated, created, regulated, and we want to learn for aerospace from other industries. There’s no question there’s a bias for aerospace, but you need to have some cross-pollination for it to be really viable.”

As the Air Capital of the World for close to nine decades, Wichita has plenty of advantages over other cities — Cessna and Learjet are still headquartered there, among hundreds of other manufacturers — and Wichita State, in turn, has plenty of related advantages over other schools. But this Innovation Campus can help bridge whatever gap had developed between gown and town. Bardo said he guesses will be finished within the next decade. By 2027, other major manufacturers are expected to join Airbus as tenants, many of them with little to do with aerospace.

Tellier described the whole thing as “an experiential learning center,” and it is. Any place where teens and 20somethings can work with the newest tools, where companies can come develop prototypes, where massive working drones are on display in the lobby, is most definitely established on experience.

It’s also a new way to experience learning, and if it really works, other schools will try to fly just as high.