The Learning Factory is continually supervised by trained personnel and can be scheduled by any engineering class requiring its facilities. Students go through a training and certification course to instruct them in safety, basic machining, welding and CAD Software before they can use the facility's equipment. It's open days, evenings and weekends for general student use. The facility fulfills an important aspect of the curriculum, which is that student's must build their own prototypes for their business-sponsored projects. The curriculum was carefully crafted with input from industry managers and practicing engineers.
Courses are competency-based and stress results and practical knowledge over theory.
This also allows instructors to view and select materials from a comprehensive resource database which all faculty contribute to. All students taking first-year engineering courses are required to be proficient with computers and the Internet and they must document their work online. All student design projects conducted during the semester are placed online and assembled as a resource library. Students can reference the library as an online portfolio and faculty can use the same database as a resource for design projects. The freshman course ends with a student design competition based on real-world industry problems and judged by industry volunteers and sponsors.