3D car manufacturing game for schools launched by joint venture of industry giants
Siemens and BMW have collaborated to develop a unique online car manufacturing game for schools, as part of the ground breaking Siemens Education Portal launched in February last year.
It will form part of the Siemens Education Portal which for the first time lets teachers, students and parents access a central hub of information about Siemens to be used in the classroom. It is explicitly designed to encourage young people to engage with engineering and manufacturing related subjects.
The interactive game is set to be rolled out across the UK and forms part of a drive to encourage more young people into highly skilled engineering jobs. It will focus on modern production processes within the automotive industry and will allow school children to make a number of virtual vehicles including the new MINI model.
The education portal hosts a range of interactive education materials supporting Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) related subjects; from a range of comprehensive schemes of work to enable practical application in the classroom to inspiring 3D games based on some of the most ground breaking industrial projects and technological innovation in the UK.
The portal has already been rolled out to every secondary school across the UK and is aiming to reach over 1.95 million pupils by 2014 and 4.5 million by 2016. The aim of the portal is to inspire students, support teachers and communicate to parents the considerable opportunities open to young people working in today’s industry and manufacturing environments.
The latest interactive game in the Siemens Education Series will illustrate lean production methods in order to complete as many orders as cost efficiently as possible. Teachers introduce the concept of lean manufacturing by using MINI as a gold standard case study and encourage students to explore how MINIs are manufactured at the world leading Oxford Plant.
Juergen Maier, Siemens Industry Managing Director said: “Investing in education, skills and young people is absolutely critical if we are to develop the engineers of the future. Working with BMW we have been able to demonstrate, in an interesting and engaging way, how modern factories work using advanced manufacturing technology.
“The interactive game provides an insight as to how the production line actually works; reinforcing the fact that advanced manufacturing in the automotive sector is capable of providing the highly skilled jobs of the future. Hopefully that will inspire children as young as 11 to consider manufacturing for a long term career – which is one of our central skills objectives at Siemens.”
Before providing students with the opportunity to play the game, the teacher will explain how the illustration in the game varies from actual MINI production in terms of two key elements: number of staff and production line split.
Students will then have an opportunity to play the game which will provide an illustration of how a car is manufactured in broad terms using lean principles. The plenary will enable teachers to review students’ game play success and discuss how these would impact in a real life manufacturing facility.
Simon Farrall, Head of Education and Training for BMW UK said: “We want to transform the perceptions of young people in the UK, and radically boost the number of people working in the automotive sector, which right now is booming across the country.
“By embedding the game into schools up and down the country we can inspire and excite young people to consider a career in an engineering and technology based environment. Further still we can develop our outreach activity with the intention of securing a strong and effective pipeline of young people curious about the world of manufacturing”.
Siemens has already invested in the up-skilling of young people interested in engineering and manufacturing through the sponsorship of a number of University Technical Colleges across the UK. The business has over 300 apprentices and recently the number of apprenticeships exceeded the graduate intake. Siemens recently launched its own Junior Factory, a production line run entirely by an apprenticeship management team in the world leading Congleton facility which makes drives and invertors.
Professor Richard Parry Jones CBE, co-chair of the Automotive Council said: “The automotive sector is undergoing a powerful revival, and as demand surges so too will the need for highly skilled engineers. It is therefore vital that we find new and innovative ways to engage with young people and enthuse them about the opportunities in advanced manufacturing.
“This interactive game alongside the portfolio of education materials is clearly aimed at reaching large numbers of young people. We need more UK-based manufacturers to follow the example set by Siemens and BMW coming together to highlight the importance of teaching science, mathematics and engineering in our schools.”
BMW has also invested heavily in skills. It has built an on-site technical training centre in Oxford and, in the last three years, more than doubled the number of apprentices in training in the Oxford, Swindon and Hams Hall production facilities. There have also been very large scale general up-skilling and technical training programmes to support the existing workforce in the launch of the next generation of exciting MINI and BMW product.
To see and interact with the full education portal and the BMW game please visit:
www.siemens.co.uk/education/en
