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2016 faculty course development award: application-oriented IM teaching based on industrial electronics and instrumentation at the University of Trento

Measurement science and technologies play a key role in a variety of disciplines of Industrial Engineering. Even though the fundamentals of instrumentation and measurement (I&M) definitely require general and fully dedicated courses, there are situations in which, for context-specific educational needs or constraints, it is of primary importance to emphasize how the I&M body of knowledge is related to a given application domain. This is, for instance, the case of interdisciplinary degree programs (e.g., in Mechatronics Engineering) whose students are required to gain skills in a wide range of subjects squeezed into a limited number of credits and within a relatively short time. In this kind of situation, courses dealing only with I&M topics could be regarded as useful but not essential for the main goal of the degree program, and consequently, they could be perceived to have a marginal role. However, in the authors' experience, such risks can be greatly mitigated if educators create a strong relationship between the I&M body of knowledge and the application field in which measurement instruments and techniques are supposed to be used, e.g., to describe physical phenomena, to explain the behavior of specific systems and devices or to analyze their performance. The teaching module "Industrial Electronics and Instrumentation," which received the Faculty Course Development Award by the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society (IMS) in 2016, is indeed based on this paradigm. The rationale of the course stems from the educational needs of industrial electronics [1], which is also one of the key priorities for the development of next-generation smart manufacturing (usually labeled as "Industry 4.0" in Europe). The course has been officially included in the educational offering of the M.S. degree program in Mechatronics Engineering of the University of Trento, Italy since Academic Year 2016-2017.