SME Adventures in Innovation through Manufacturing for High Schoolers
(AIM HIGH)
It is imperative that we aggressively pursue the recruitment of highly-talented manufacturing engineering students in order to ensure the growth and future impact of our profession. To this end, Oregon State University, in partnership with the Microproducts Breakthrough Institute, proposes to initiate an “Adventures in Innovation through Manufacturing for High Schoolers” (AIM HIGH) event as part of the 39th SME North American Manufacturing Research Conference to be collocated with the ASME International Manufacturing Science & Engineering Conference and JSME/ASME International Conference on Materials & Processing in Corvallis in June 2011.
The AIM HIGH event will target the recruitment of high-achieving local area high school students into the OSU manufacturing engineering program. Our intent is to take advantage of this unique conference venue to launch an annual OSU manufacturing engineering recruitment program. Through the AIM HIGH event, students will interact with manufacturing engineers from around the world, instilling excitement to pursue an education and career in manufacturing engineering. This program will provide a blueprint for successfully implementing variations of this theme in partnership with regional universities at future SME NAMRC conferences.
Specifically, we plan to host 25 students on the Wednesday of the conference. The objective is to change students’ perspectives of manufacturing being a dated, dirty industry that is moving overseas to one that is advanced and innovative with an exciting future. The proposed program outline is as follows:
8:00am – 10:30am
Morning at the conference attending the plenary lecture and expert panel on manufacturing paradigms of the 21st century.
10:30am – 11:00am
Travel to lunch.
11:00am – noon
Working lunch to debrief the morning session with manufacturing engineers from local industry. This will be done in conjunction with Eugene and Portland SME chapters.
Noon – 12:30pm
Proceed to the Microproducts Breakthrough Institute.
12:30pm – 2:30pm
Interactive tour at the Microproducts Breakthrough Institute involving five 20 minute rotations at stations introducing the students to micro/nano fabrication techniques and applications. OSU graduate students and OSU SME student chapter members will help out.
2:30pm
Debriefing of what has been learned.
Microproducts Breakthrough Institute
Some of the educational activities to be experienced at the Microproducts Breakthrough Institute include (a) sputtering a thin film and observing color changes as a function of film thickness, (b) direct-writing a name plate with a laser, (c) embossing a logo, (d) ultrasonic welding of a small toy assembly, and (e) characterization by optical profilometry.
For more information, please contact:
Prof. Sundar V. Atre
E-mail: Sundar.Atre@oregonstate.edu
