Brainerd. Brainerd High School. March 24, 2017 FOCUS GROUPS

Transcription

1 STUDENTS FOCUS GROUPS Brainerd March 24, 2017 Brainerd High School What attracted you to take these kinds of classes? I think this might apply to some other people, but it started for me in seventh grade when we began the HAB club. It s a high altitude balloon club. It was our first engineering club experience, per se, and it kind of really got me on the track of going into engineering and design. What did you like about it? The fact that it was kind of just open-minded. We had a task, but we had no idea how to complete the task. We brainstormed, and instead of regular classes where it s like, Here s the answer, you didn t have an answer. You had to figure it out with whatever means you had. My grandfather was an engineer. He had his own research company, so I ve always been sort of inspired by that. I guess my dad went to school to be an engineer, and I thought it d be fun. And has it been? It has been pretty fun, yeah. Sponsors: Clow Stamping Company, Pequot Tool and Manufacturing 156

2 Yeah, that was kind of the same for me. My grandpa, especially when I was growing up, he was very mechanically inclined. He always had a little shop in his garage. We got a CNC, a milling machine, and a drill press and all this other kind of stuff. He s always making something. It s pretty fun. Ever since I was a little kid, I ve kind of been exposed to that. What kind of career are you thinking about? Well, an engineer, but I don t really know what field yet. I ve been thinking of going into biomechanical engineering. It s an excellent combination of what I ve kind of been interested in. I planned on going into mechanical engineering with a focus in, probably, design, because I really like the design portion of it. Mechanical engineering, robotics that sort of thing. I want to go into the medical field right now, but I haven t been 100 percent interested in engineering since my freshman year. I could always tie engineering into a medical field, like medical engineering, especially because the field of prosthetics and all that kind of stuff is ever-expanding. I want to major in mechanical engineering, and one of my dreams is to work in the oil industry and in natural gas. I m thinking either mechanical or civil engineering. Last year, I was pretty set on mechanical engineering, and then this year was the first year that computer science course was offered. I took that, and that caught my interest a little more, so I m going into computer science next year. I m going to go into an engineering field. I m not really sure what yet, though. I m going to go into mechanical engineering. I m also looking into a medical field, maybe as a registered nurse. Anyone who s thinking about a two-year degree? This is my entire plan for what I want to be when I grow up: I was planning on going to (SCHOOL) next year and the year after that, just to 157

3 get the generals done, and then head off to the (SCHOOL) to specialize. Manufacturing executives tend to worry about where they are going to find the next generation of employees. What would you say to them? I feel that if you re taking the engineering classes beforehand already going into the field you hear all these things. But if you have no exposure to these engineering classes, you won t hear a thing. I agree somewhat, but I find it hard to believe that nobody s heard anything, because even in seventh and eighth grade we re required to take two tech-ed courses. They don t go into depth there, obviously, but it definitely exposes you to the start of here s what you could possibly do with this kind of degree and stuff. Project Lead the Way makes it very easy to hear about the different options. In POE we had three speakers come in and talk for different businesses. And then one of the ones from the student success center came down here and talked to us about the different career options and everything. I would say it s right to a certain extent, but it s becoming less so, because I know I have a friend who graduated a few years back. He had no idea our high school offered engineering courses. So, when he went into college for engineering, he was not as prepared as we re going to be having taken those courses, and that was similar for a lot of people around the state. When I was talking with my uncle who does civil work in Bemidji, there wasn t as much exposure even five or six years ago. The exposure, because people are becoming interested in these fields, has really been on the rise. Let s talk about the robotics team. What do you like about it? You don t really have to worry about anything. You just kind of go, and if you have a good idea, you have a good idea. If you have a bad idea, you have a bad idea, and you just kind of deal with it. It s just a place to go where you can have fun and still get stuff done at the same time. If your friends are on the team, it makes it a lot more fun. It s a learning environment. You get to work with your hands. There s friends there s a lot of friends. When can you start being on the robotics team? Generally we don t start promoting it until sophomore year. This is our tenth year, actually. We didn t do as well as we were hoping, but we ll take it. 158

4 And how does it work? Every year, it s a different challenge that s put out. They give us six weeks to build, and then after that the season s over and you can t build anymore. Then you go off to a three-day competition and just compete against multiple schools around your region. I think there s about 60-ish teams at each regional, and there s thousands of regionals across the United States; so there s quite a few teams. They re getting close to probably 8,000 teams, and it s not just the United States, like last year. It s global. There was a team from Australia. Yeah, at our regional. At our regional. They flew all the way from Australia. Now, this year there s two. How did they get into your region? It s open. The regionals aren t like regionals. There s a regional that happens here, and anyone can sign up for that regional. It s always developing. There s constantly teams, even in Europe and everywhere. They opened up some in China this past year. Yeah, and then there were two more teams from Israel that formed this year. Literally anybody can join, too. Do the local companies get involved? Absolutely. That s our only source of money. We don t get much from the high school, so our only funding, really, is donations. We actually do a spaghetti 159

5 feed every year, too. They don t cost anything though. They donate quite a bit to us. Does it help open your eyes to what these companies do? It does, because the trips that I told you about earlier, those are directly through our robotics team. We take a trip every year to a company that sponsors us. It gives them the opportunity to present their company, tell us about job opportunities in the future, and then it s just a really nice experience that everyone can go to. How many people are on the team? 25-ish. 25-ish, somewhere around there. No, as many people who want to join can join. The robotics team especially has a lack of exposure in the high schools, so not many. Even kids in engineering classes, there s not many that join it. I mean, there s probably a dozen engineering courses. Out of all of those courses that have 30 kids, there s only 25 kids in robotics; so there isn t much exposure. We set up a table in the lunch room the first day of school every year to try to promote it. Whoever wants to join can join. But you have to be in high school Who is a sophomore or higher A lot of times it s the time commitment, because I know for that sixweek period, it s 3:10 when school gets out and we re not leaving until sometimes 7, 8, up to 9 o clock at night. 11 o clock. 11 o clock Yeah, we were here until 11 o clock one night. Monday through Friday, and then Saturday, we come in at 9 o clock in the morning, and sometimes don t leave until 6, 7 o clock at night still. It s just that time commitment is off-putting for a lot of people. What do the companies get out of it? One, they get recognition and exposure because at the robotics competition everyone usually has their sponsors on their T-shirts, or a big banner with their sponsors. When you go into competition, your biggest contributors, or what you see as your most important sponsors, get listed 160

6 when they announce your team as it s coming out. It s a good way to get exposure for the companies and recognition as sponsoring a high school event. Also, just from taking the trips to these companies, we ve seen someone say, Hey look, here s one of the old team members that is now working at the company. Yeah, there s a lot of old team members, and probably current team members, now, who will end up working at one of our sponsors because we go there and we say, Hey, this is a pretty nice gig. We could do this, and then go to school, and then come back to Brainerd and work for him. So, they do get some employees out of it as well. Yeah, it helps them find people who are going to turn into those skilled workers they want, and a lot of us really, that s the only exposure we re going to get to those types of companies. Because a lot of times, you ll come out of college, you have no idea what s a good company or what s a bad company you haven t visited them too often. Robotics is a great way to visit your sponsors and just learn more about different places you could potentially go and find one that suits you. You can take all the classes you want, but you re not going to get an event like that where you re given six weeks to have this problem solved and then have the pressure you have for robotics, so it s very similar to what you would have in the real world. It really is. It s a very unique experience. There s no class where you have six weeks, and as soon as those six weeks are up, you can t work. There s a deadline, and you have to get it done by the deadline. It changes every year, like the classes. Your intro to engineering design class it s very similar to principles of engineering it s just principles of engineering goes one step deeper into it. It s because it s such a great experience. We re upset we missed out on a year. But the first year most of us were in it the seniors, at least we joked and called it the forklift simulator. It was called recycle rush, and you were stacking recycling totes and putting a recycling bin on top of them; a forklift simulator. You re just lifting and stacking. That was a really good, real-life problem. Next year it s called stronghold completely different. It was a medieval theme, and you were driving over obstacles, opening doors, lifting gates, and then trying to shoot balls into a tower and climb up 161

7 the tower very different. A very fun thing unlike football, where every year you have the exact same skills to work on, the same plays, you have to get better at. You develop your skills in robotics. You work on those skills, but you re not applying them in the same way at all. It changes drastically every year; just like it would in an engineering firm if you were given a new design by a different company. How important was that team to helping you decide what you want to do with your life, professionally? You might go in thinking, Oh, I want to be a mechanical engineer. And then you might need to do something not mechanical on the robot, and you realize that was pretty fun. For me and electrical, I was pretty set on mechanical and then I started doing the electrical stuff, and I realized that was pretty fun. It was a coin toss between those two. Then this year, again, I started a computer science class. So I changed my mind a few times, and one of those was due to robotics. I feel that the classes offered, they re really nice, they teach you the basics, but they can t give you the real-world experience. You can t recreate it in a class. Instead of just these classes that tell you what to do, it s really just openminded. It s not guided at all like class. In class, you have this handbook that you have to do these steps. It s not guided. It s very much like the real world. Did you get it done? Yeah, we got it done. It works. It wasn t good. We never used it. Yeah, we never used it. It wasn t cost effective. Yeah. As part of the game, we didn t see that it would give us enough 162

8 points. That s a great way to learn. If they work, they work, and we put it on the robot. Fail often and fail gloriously. There you go. We will never tell (NAME) we say this, but I think he s figured it out. When the first year team members come up to us and say, (NAME) wanted me to design it like this. I don t know how to do that. We ll look at them and say, You can ignore (NAME). You realize this, right? You don t listen to (NAME). He will give you a general idea, but a lot of times he s going off of past experiences. He s been the coach of the team for 10 years. The game isn t the same game, so the past experiences will help, but you can t base it solely off that. So he will give us an idea, like we needed to load the balls into the shooter, and he told me, I need some sort of rotating hoe. I came back with my first prototype and he went, What the heck is that? He will give you a general idea, but if you don t think you can make it work the way he wants it to, you can kind of ignore him. So long as you get a design that works, he s okay with it. I think (NAME) and (NAME) did that with the shooter. He was like, Okay, we need it to be like this. And they re like, No, we ll just build it like this and brought it to him, and it worked a little bit. Then we just kept refining it. Absolutely. Within the team, we split people up. People can join whenever, we don t tell them they have to do it. But we split into mechanical, electrical, (NAME) did all our CADing this year, and we split up into four, five different groups within the team. You split up into the different teams within the team, and then you can just join whatever team you want. You re usually on mechanical, and you want to join the electrical team. You can join the electrical or try it out for a year. You can basically do whatever you want. We do split it up into the different fields, so you can get a taste of everything. Did anybody change their interest was as a result of being on the robotics team? 163

9 Well, my first year I was doing programming, and then I realized the challenges of programming and the fact that we had a person who would not teach programming. Our person, the senior, who was doing the programming was doing a horrible job of explaining it. He was a good programmer, but he didn t like working with anyone else, and he wrote his code in a way that no one could understand it but him. He used a programmer shorthand that, when you were reading it, he d have a limit switch program, but he would have the weirdest names for it a limit switch could be PQD4M. And not even the mentors who are experienced in the field could figure it out. They had no clue what he was doing. What is this? And he didn t teach it very well. That highly discouraged me from doing that again, so I went into electrical instead, and found my niche there. Had a good time. I m definitely feeling pretty confident. Just within the computer science class, we actually have a programmer who went to this high school, and he actually got inducted into the hall of fame. We had a pep fest for him, and then he came and talked to our class. He explained this is what he does with a computer science major. Through him explaining that, I felt that I got a very good idea on what my career field will end up being. It s not quite the team where you get your actual job experience and what you re going to be, it s through the classroom. With those speakers we had come in, they talk about what they re going to be doing, as well as the trips that we ve taken to the companies. Seeing actually what is going on in the company and what people are doing that s where we get our exposure. Let s talk about the value of company tours. What s your favorite part of touring a company? They re usually only like an hour and a half or whatever. You basically run through the whole entire building. When we went to (COMPANY), we saw their assembly line and where their brainstorming office sections are. It s really interesting, because you see this is what it s going to be like if you go into a job for engineering at a plant doing something. You re going 164

10 to have your assembly line area. Most of it s, at least for (COMPANY), was automation from robots, with a couple people working on it, and then their brainstorming area, and how collaborative all of that can be. My favorite part is usually just watching the machine, like the CNCs and that kind of stuff just run, because it s a very unique thing to watch. You can just see it, especially when it gets cooking on a part, and goes real fast, it s honestly so fun to watch for me. You can see it go and switch bits, and then come back, and switch bits, and then come back. Like at (COMPANY), it was basically like a big three by three. It would pick up a part, and then it rolls the components, like capacitors and all that kind of stuff. It would pick them up and drop them on. That s honestly my favorite part, just watching the autonomous robots working on the parts. How have you decided where you want to go to school when you graduate? For me, it wasn t so much what my friends are doing obviously that was a minor part of it. Yeah, it s nice to be there with your friends, but I know a lot of us, we re just kind of, one by one, we re like, Well, maybe we should go to (SCHOOL). Maybe we should go... Like (NAME) has known since freshman year, because his brother went there. Then sophomore year, I think a couple more of us were like, Well, that s a good option. The next year, more and more of us just kind of gravitated there. I don t know whether it was friends for other people, but for me it was just the cost of the school. I know a lot of people who have gone there, it s a very good education and it s a very good program overall is what I ve heard. For how good of a program it is at this school for engineering, and it s so close to home, too. We can go to other schools that are really good, but they re going to be miles away in a different state. When we talk about it we ll say, Oh yeah, we re all going to a (SCHOOL). And then we re like, Oh wait, we re in North Dakota. But I think, like (NAME) said, it s a very nice program, especially for the cost. If you re a person that wants to go far away, like California or what have you, go. But for most people who are like, I want to get away from home, but still roughly within the region, it s one of the greatest schools in the region that offers the best education with such an affordable price, so it just makes sense. Yeah, and if you re in Minnesota, you actually get the state tuition rates 165

11 there as well. So that helps. I think the out-of-state tuition s like $26,000, but the in-state s like $17,000 or $18,000, so it does reduce the cost by quite a bit. Can I infer that most of you are thinking that you might come back to the Brainerd Lakes area when you get your careers going? For me, I m not going to specifically come back to Brainerd for a job. If my job happens to take me to Brainerd, then so be it. But I would come back if I was offered a job here. Like right after college, I would come back. But I wouldn t go out of my way to come back to Brainerd. It s a nice city, don t get me wrong, but I just have to get out. It s a nice place to raise a family, but it s not necessarily a bustling hub for engineering and, say, medical. How important are internships in your plan? For me, I plan on doing at least a couple internships over the summer after my sophomore year and my junior year just to get some exposure and hopefully that will go over well. It s interesting, because in the summer, you can work for money or you can work for experience. Sometimes you have to give that trade-off. If you don t work for money, work for experience instead. It s now coming to the point where you get out of college, and places won t hire you because you don t possess the experience. You almost need to sacrifice a summer of not getting a ton of money, and you get all that experience, because that will help you get the money eventually, after you get out of college. There are a lot of internships that offer money. I m doing one this summer for (COMPANY), and they re also doing both the learning experience and the money. My brother s taken a few internships that are all paid positions. Obviously some are. Something s better than nothing, right? Internships, for me, are very important going into my field. I took the civil engineering class, and I want to go into mechanical engineering. But I do still have an interest in civil engineering and architecture. I thought it was a very interesting course, so I m actually planning to work over the summer at (COMPANY) in Bemidji, because they offer jobs to high school and college students. I think that d be a 166

12 great experience, because it is paid, and you are going to get that good real workplace experience, and it will give me a little bit more exposure. It will either change my mind, and I ll find out before I m too far into college to change it, or solidify my pre-existing disposition towards mechanical engineering. Why aren t more females interested in the engineering? I think it s just the fact that for the longest time, it s been a maledominated field, and they re working to try to get more women into the field and get it out that women can do this just like men can. I think the reason why it s still taking so long is that a lot of women still don t know how many options are available for them. How might they find out about the options? I think a lot of it is taking classes like this in high school, so you can see what you re interested in before you go to college, and then you may only be one of two or three women in your classes. But if you do these engineering classes in high school, then you have an idea of what you re getting into, and you re more prepared. Yeah, a lot of girls that I know, when I start talking about my engineering, they re like, Oh I could never do that. It s like, Well you could do it, but you just choose not to. Just because you think you can t do it, doesn t mean you absolutely can t do it. If they work hard enough, work enough at it, they could become engineers. I also feel it s the stereotype. Women aren t supposed to do this. Women aren t supposed to go into this. And I feel as though we don t get exposed to it because everyone thinks we shouldn t do this, so they re not going to take the courses. I think a large part of it is the mental block. Just like that, you think, Nobody does it, so I m just not going to do it. And then that s that for you. Yeah, because I ve certainly tried recruiting both men and women to the team, and the biggest thing everyone says is, Well, I can t build a robot. Or they ll say, Oh, well I m not interested in robotics. But it s more than just the robotics field. There s obviously, within that, there s a mechanical part of it. But they ll say, Oh, I m not interested in that. Or, I can t do that. But it still would help you discover what you could do, and 167

13 you never know. If they say, Oh I don t want to do that, and then they go take a couple classes on it, and decide it is going to be pretty fun then they change their minds and go to the same school, there s multiple programs in every school, obviously. It s definitely a lack of understanding. I know my grandparents came last year for the robotics competition, and they looked at the robot, and said, Wow, these robots are really different. Yeah, we built the robot. Oh, I just thought you guys got a robot and programmed it, and I didn t think you were interested in computers. I spend almost the entire season in the metal shop building prototypes. And people see the robot, and then they usually see, when they see pictures of robotics, they see the big fancy robot, then they see the typical nerdy kid with glasses on the computer typing. They don t think deeper beyond that into the fact that someone needs to build it. Someone needs to design it. Yes, the programming is a really vital part. The robot doesn t work if it s not programmed, but it s just lack of understanding of the fact that it does need to be built, too. You can t program the robot if it s not built. Yeah. And the robot doesn t just appear for us. All that comes as, basically we get aluminum shaft, and aluminum sheeting and all that kind of stuff....and a drive face... Yeah, and a drive face. But then after that, you got to figure out your drive system, what you want to do for that, and then where you re going to put all your components. The components of the actual robot don t really change year by year. Where you place them, how it s all set up, does. 168