A year-long collaboration between AE's Aerospace Systems Design Lab (ASDL), the Boeing Company, and three other universities was recognized recently by Chief Learning Officer magazine with a Learning In Practice award.

Boeing executives Michael Richey and Barry McPherson accepted a Gold Award on behalf of the Aerospace Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering (AerosPACE), a program that  brought together students from Georgia Tech, Purdue, Embry Riddle and Brigham Young for a year-long design-build-fly modeling project.

The award recognized the Boeing Company's commitment to fostering collaboration among the engineering students, who worked remotely on many aspects of the project.

At Georgia Tech, the foundation of the AerosPACE project was laid by ASDL research engineers Neil Weston, Ph.D., and Carl Johnson, who jointly taught the Capstone Design Class that prepared students for the final fly-off in April. Weston, Johnson, and ASDL director Dimitri Mavris, Ph.D., were recognized by the Boeing AerosPACE team

as they accepted the award during the magazine's Learning in Practice Symposium, October 5.

This is the second major award bestowed on the AerosPACE program. In July, the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) recognized the program with an Excellence in Engineering Education Collaboration Award.

Launched in the fall of 2013, the AerosPACE project tasked teams from each of the participating schools with designing, building, testing, and deploying a UAV that was capable of accurately monitoring agricultural crops and delivering useful information on irrigation, pesticide use, and vegetative health. Geographically disbursed, the teams learned creative ways to collaborate.

“Effective collaboration – across different engineering disciplines, different cultures even different time zones – is the biggest challenge in today’s business world,” said  Marcus Nance, one of several Boeing executives who oversaw the 2013-14 AerosPACE project.

“At Boeing, we have a 24-hour workforce, with engineers collaborating on the same project all around the world. Today’s students will need to have collaboration skills to succeed.”

The 2014 Learning In Practice Awards were announced at a special awards ceremony during the Fall 2014 Chief Learning Officer Symposium in Carlsbad, California. That event attracted more than 300 top corporate learning executives from around the world to discuss long-term learning strategies for creating and sustaining high performance.

The symposium was sponsored by Human Capital Media,  which publishes Chief Learning Officermagazine.

The ASDL is participating in the AerosPACE challenge for the 2014-15 school year, which will also include participation by student engineers from Tuskegee Univeristy.