TITLE:
A Four-Stage Integrated Teaching Model Coupling Curriculum, Experiment, Course Design and Competition in Logistics Equipment Education
AUTHORS:
Dapeng Yang, Yanli Yuan, Nan He, Xiaoyang Yu, Yongcheng Mu, Li Sun
KEYWORDS:
Teaching Reform, Logistics Engineering, Four-Stage Integration, Competition-Driven Learning, Outcome-Based Education, Course Design
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.11,
November
10,
2026
ABSTRACT: Logistics equipment courses are currently mostly organized into self-contained teaching units, including classroom lectures, verification experiments, short-term course projects, and extracurricular competitions for a few students. Undergraduates pass each unit but seldom carry one engineering problem across all of them. The consequence extends beyond the individual course. Intelligent logistics and handling equipment is among the fastest-moving segments of the logistics technology sector, and graduates whose only design experience is a drawing set or a simplified simulation enter the industry without the system-level competence that equipment manufacturers and integrators now assume. This paper reports a four-stage integrated model developed for Logistics Technology and Equipment, a 48-hour compulsory course for third-year logistics engineering students. A single competition-derived task, the intelligent handling track of the China University Engineering Practice and Innovation Ability Competition, runs through every stage: classroom instruction (40 h), in-class experimentation (8 h), a two-week course design, and a final year of competition and thesis work. Each stage produces an artefact the next consumes, so a student who finishes the sequence has built and defended a working automated guided vehicle. Across five delivery cycles and roughly 150 students, the model has yielded 6 national and more than 10 provincial awards, 3 outstanding theses, and three textbooks used in the course. The contribution to the field is structural rather than technological: it shows how an equipment-oriented syllabus, a laboratory sequence and a capstone competition can be joined by explicit, assessable artefact handovers, so that participation in practice-oriented work is organized across an entire cohort rather than left to a self-selected minority. The evidence documents implementation and artefact continuity across five cycles; it does not establish measured gains in individual engineering competence, because the study has no control group and compares cohorts rather than conditions.