STEM Academy English teacher & FIRST Team 3824 RoHAWKtics Mentor Hardin Valley Academy, Knoxville, TN
FOCUS ON THE WorkForce
Using FIRST Robotics and Additive Manufacturing for Workforce Development
The future of U.S. manufacturing is evolving rapidly. This presents educators like myself with a fundamental problem: How do we develop tomorrow’s manufacturing workforce? One possible solution has emerged in the community that, 70 years ago, secretly manufactured the materials that won World War II: Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
It all began three years ago when a handful of students
at Hardin Valley Academy (HVA) approached a teacher and asked: “Can we start a FIRST Robotics team?” As with any normal group of students, they waited until the
last minute and had one week to raise the $5000 entrance fee. The teacher called a few friends to ask for funding but was
saw the potential and offered both financial and manufac- turing support. Building a robot was a grueling process, but we finished
on time and competed at the Smoky Mountain Regional, where we won the Rookie Team award and secured a spot to compete at the National Competition in St. Louis in April of 2010. Kids from all over the country met at the Edward Jones Arena cheering for their teams while their robots were competing on the field. Our team finished 56th, an incred- ible feat for a rookie team. In the fall of 2011, the lab mentors, Lonnie Love, Craig Blue, and Martin Keller, agreed to return to help the team. This time
Build season for FIRST is an intense six weeks. Teams work every night and all day Saturdays in order to meet the deadline for when the robot is to be completed.
short. Enter a few engineers from Oak Ridge National Labora- tory (ORNL) who were community volunteers and had connec- tions mere teachers do not. Within a few days the team had the entrance fee and our first FIRST (For Inspiration and Recogni- tion of Science and Technology) robotics season began. We had six weeks to build a robot. But when the team met at the school, the mentors for
ORNL asked to see the shop. Shop? High schools no longer support shop classes. It’s a liability. One student spoke up: “We have a 3D printer.” In the eyes of the mentors, this was a seminal moment. One mentor rapidly taught three students Computer Aided Design. They began using their Stratasys uPrint to print out brackets, couplings, gears, pulleys. But it wasn’t enough. Oak Ridge contacted Jeff DeGrange, VP of Stratasys, and asked for help. Stratasys
around, the team decided they would print the entire robot! No one had ever done this, let alone high school students. ORNL would even let our team have space at their Manu-
facturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) to work. But our kids wanted to open it up to other schools’ teams, too. So we approached the MDF staff. Not only were they receptive, but they took it a step further and were able to help secure funding from DOE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO), the lab’s contractor (Battelle) and Stratasys to support eight teams in the East Tennessee region.
On Jan. 8, 2012, over 200 students, teachers and volun- teers gathered at the MDF for the kick-off of FIRST’s 2012 game, Rebound Rumble. The teams were to design, build and program a robot that could not only play basketball, but could balance on a teeter-totter bridge with another robot. As soon