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Editorial Staff Where Have All the 3D Dreamers Gone?
n industry insider told me something fascinating the other day: Although flexible five- axis machining centers have grown rapidly in popularity, and have become financially accessible to many shop floors, many of these shops are not actually using these expensive machines to their full capabilities. Rather, he said, too many operators can’t get their heads around programming the machines for single setup operations. So, instead, they are using their five-axis machines to do a series of precision functions, just as they might have done before they had the machine in the first place.
As we discussed the nature of the problem, he zeroed in on the inability of even expe- rienced manufacturing professionals to think through a series of complex 3D machining pro- cesses, and then program their machines to complete them. Even for a seasoned veteran, he assured me, “Thinking in three dimensions is very complicated.” All of this got me to thinking about our nation’s shortage of skilled manufacturing professionals, and the many dimensions of our skills gap. Or, more specifically, our spatial skills gap. I recently stumbled upon some research that made me wonder if there’s an underappreciated third dimension to this problem, and one that hints at meaningful, longer term solutions. That is, the failure to test for spatial ability as a dis- tinct form of intelligence. There are many forms of intelligence in this world, of course, but broadly speaking, our educational system tends to put everything into two buckets, verbal and mathematical. A team at Vanderbilt University wrote about the importance of spatial ability in the STEM fields in the Journal of Educational Psychology (
http://tinyurl.com/spatialskills) and has advocated testing for spatial ability in schools. It defined that ability as the mental ability “to generate, retain, retrieve, and transform well-structured visual images” and noted “the need to identify and nurture scientific and technical talent has never been greater.”
They wrote that the neglect of spatial ability in education, which they called an “important dimension of cognitive functioning, leads to untapped pools of talent. ... Contemporary talent searches miss many intellectually talented students by restricting selection criteria to mathematical and verbal ability measures.” As the manufacturing industry continues to move toward incredibly advanced five-axis machines and robots, the need for a spatially skilled workforce is growing rapidly. So I ask: How will our already-challenged industry be able to identify the people who can program and operate these complex machines?
EDITOR IN CHIEF Sarah A. Webster 313-425-3252
swebster@sme.org
SENIOR EDITORS Michael C. Anderson 313-425-3258
manderson@sme.org
James A. Lorincz 440-779-6946
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James D. Sawyer 313-425-3053
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Patrick Waurzyniak 313-425-3256
pwaurzyniak@sme.org
ASSISTANT EDITOR Katelyn DaMour 313-425-3251
ASSISTANT EDITOR Darlene M. Pietryka 313-425-3255
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. Copyright © 2013 by SME.
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ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | December 2013
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