World Twin Program for Teaching Mechatronics and Robotics Globally: An Experience Report from two Intertwined Degree Programs

In a globalized world, communication and exchange on a technical level, as well as the movement of personnel, are becoming increasingly crucial. We currently see globally distributed development processes, making it necessary for en-gineers from different cultural backgrounds to work seamlessly together. Additionally, there is a rise in work-related movement across country borders. Consequently, degree programs often integrate courses on intercultural competencies or global engi-neering perspectives. However, this is only a first step toward understanding international counterparts. Often, it is more about creating awareness of cultural pitfalls and barriers rather than developing an integrated curriculum. To enable seamless communication and work across borders, a shared curriculum is needed. Engineers need to speak the same language and have the same background and understanding. Therefore, we propose the World Twin Program, which establishes comparable curricula across universities in different countries. This program also allows for integrating degree programs closely and enables student exchanges with partner universities to gain a deep understanding of cultural backgrounds and differences. In this paper, we report our experiences with this program, focusing on two well-established twin programs for mechatronics and robotics offered to different student bodies. From these experiences, we can already draw important conclusions for establishing World Twins.