"Our high school kids are going to design and construct the STEM lab," said Elisa Harris, career technical director for Hartselle High School. "Once the lab is completed, we hope by the end of this school year, these high school students will go and lead workshops for younger students and for recruiting opportunities for the manufacturing program."
The students will use what they have already learned in the manufacturing classes and apply it to the mobile STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) lab. Such a lab allows students to engage in activities and projects that use critical thinking, problem-solving and innovation.
The lab will be like a tiny house on a trailer frame with solar panels to power it, room for toolboxes and hand tools and anything else needed for the various workshops for kids and manufacturing program recruitment, Harris said. They will use manufacturing skills such as blueprint reading and safety processes in the making of the lab.
When it comes time to share their knowledge with students, they already have a plan.
"We will start out with our elementary schools and our intermediate schools, and they can go and let teachers book the lab and go and do a little STEM lab where they can show the manufacturing industry," Harris said. "They might design something and then 3D print it in the STEM lab. Or, they might learn how to design and laser cut or laser engrave things. Just some simple processes and using hand tools or maybe some soldering."
For example, the manufacturing students might make a bookmark using manufacturing techniques and a 3D printer for the younger students. A 3D printer creates physical objects from digital designs by adding material layer by layer, a process known as additive manufacturing.
"They wouldn't have the bookmark immediately, but they could get the process started and then our teacher could deliver them back to the school," Harris said. "They might not get it immediately because it takes anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours to 3D print something depending on how complicated the design is. But they could at least see it in action, and we could take them back the finished product."
Or, for even younger students, the older manufacturing students might design for Farm Day a little laser cutout pig that the children could paint, she said.
"We could even have premade kits that our high school students have made, and the little kids actually get to do something with," Harris said.
The process of teaching helps the older students progress, she said.
"There is nothing like being the teacher because they get a more in-depth understanding," Harris said. "You don't know something until you try to teach it. They will gain a lot of information and content just by teaching it because they've got to understand it and anticipate the questions that will be asked by the students."
The process of teaching also gives the older students a leadership role, she said.
There are roughly 100 to 120 students enrolled at the high school in the manufacturing program, Harris said. They hope to expand it.
How does a little stem lab bring more students into a manufacturing program at Hartselle City Schools?
Through mobility.
"It will be mobile, so we will be able to carry it from different schools — our elementary schools, junior high and even high school," said Chris Wimberley, modern manufacturing teacher at Hartselle Center of Excellence. "We can take it to community events and just kind of show what we do in class and it gives us a transportable way to do that. We can use it in the community and for education."
The plan is to power everything with solar energy.
"We want to be able to show how the solar makes it from the panel to the battery to the inverter. ... Hopefully, anything that we do on it will be visible and you can kind of see how we are using that technology or applying that technology."
The students will do the work to build the STEM lab, he said.
"We're going to try to build everything in-house, in class using everyone between my entry-level students to my advanced students," he said, noting that includes students in ninth to 12th grades.
"The tough part is that they are starting from scratch," Wimberley said. "There is no known, accessible plan for a mobile STEM lab for use in the community and for education.
"Schools have them they bought from a company that's done it but as far as having students design something from the ground up, we may be the first ones."
He said the project started as just an idea, but "then it snowballed into Mazda-Toyota getting involved with us."
Plans are to get the STEM lab completed by May but he said to do so students will have to "get after it."
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