In July 1999, the Department of Materials Science and Engineering integrated the teaching resources of the whole department to form a material science and engineering teaching laboratory, which achieved the integration of planning, management and implementation of experimental teaching work. After years of construction, the teaching laboratory has now become a material science and engineering experimental teaching base with relatively complete equipment, complete functions, and advanced teaching methods. In 2012, it was approved as the “National Experimental Teaching Demonstration Center for Advanced Materials”. In 2014, it was approved as the “National Virtual Simulation Experiment Teaching Center for Materials Science and Engineering”. The main body of the teaching laboratory is located on the 6th and 7th floors of the Yifu Technical Science Building. The total construction area is about 2,000 square meters, and the number of teaching equipment is nearly 1,000 sets. The total value of fixed assets is nearly 12 million yuan.

Based on the teaching principle of “leading at the frontier of the discipline, focusing on both virtual and experimental, and cultivating top talents”, the center has built a high-level experimental teaching team with high morality, exquisite workmanship, and optimized structure. The teaching team consists of academicians from the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Engineering and the winners of the National Outstanding Youth Fund, etc. The backbone teachers of the center have undertaken more than 200 national science and technology major projects, 973, 863, National Natural Science Foundation and other projects, and published more than 300 high-level papers. They have won many national natural science awards, technical invention awards, scientific and technological progress awards and provincial and ministerial awards.

The center relies on the world-class scientific research projects, and combines science and education to transform scientific research conditions into experimental teaching resources and transforms scientific research results into experimental teaching projects. Based on the advantages of materials disciplines and backed by cooperative enterprises, the center forms the experimental practice teaching of combining “virtual and real” and constructs a comprehensive, research-oriented and progressively improved experimental teaching system that is conducive to cultivating students' experimental hands-on ability and innovative thinking ability. The center strives to cultivate talents in the field of materials science.

The center functions are as follows: