Designing a Series of Activities to Expose High School Students to Manufacturing

Abstract High schools across the United States expose students to various types of engineering curriculum, including activities of different duration and content. The duration varies from 30 min to a class-long and beyond, going into a series of class meetings to finish an activity. A lot of content is focused on the school subject topics. Some of those subjects, like mathematics, physics, and chemistry are present in both high school and college. Others, like some types of engineering, have no direct link to the school subjects. One example is manufacturing engineering and manufacturing engineering technology. When students are unaware of the manufacturing possibilities, they end up selecting the different career paths, which is the negative scenario for the United States domestic manufacturing efforts. The authors designed a series of high school activities that would introduce students to the topics of Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 (I4.0). The goals of the activities are to a) raise student awareness and stimulate interest in the topics and b) inspire students to pursue a degree in a new manufacturing-related college major at a Midwestern university. The authors collected information on the existing activities from different sources, such as the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) website, different professional education websites of the top engineering universities in the United States, and others. The authors worked with the leadership from the Midwestern university's academia-industry collaboration center and select manufacturing industry stakeholders to retrieve additional activities. The content of the activities can provide students with the knowledge and skills that are essential for them to have in the 21st century economy. The designed activities can be useful for both the practitioners in the field and higher education institutions, who seek to inspire and recruit future talents to underrepresented fields like manufacturing. The structure of the designed activities can be used to design additional activities and align them with appropriate I4.0 competencies. The potential deployment of the activities in high school classrooms will help meet the United States strategic goal of supporting domestic manufacturing efforts and raising its competitiveness on the world market.