In the spring of 2006, the three person Automated Manufacturing Technology team representing the Orleans\Niagara BOCES (Board of Cooperative Education Services) District in New York had won the regional Skills USA competition and would be headed for the Nationals in June. Now they were faced with a problem, or an opportunity, depending how you look at it.
CAD/CAM software would one of the critical tools used by the students during the competition. Throughout the school year, the students had been using Mastercam 9. The local Mastercam representative suggested they would have a better shot at winning using the new Version X. Scott Brauer, the team’s advisor, acquired a demonstration copy and immediately handed it over to the team so they could make their own evaluation.
This was not a trivial decision. It sounded as if there would be many features in the program that could make the students much more productive. On the other hand, the students had received no instruction in the program. They would have to pick it up on their own. If the learning curve was too steep, there was a chance that changing software just before the competition could slow them down.
The new version of the software turned out to be very different from what they had been using but it did not intimidate the Skills team. After one session of using it the team members saw the substantial upside to Masterecam X. Brauer said, “There was no way they were going back to 9 after seeing how efficiently they could operate in X. They insisted that I buy it for them before the national competition. So I did.”
Armed with a new Mastercam X CAD/CAM package they had learned on the fly and an indomitable work ethic, the Orleans\ Niagara BOCES Team hit the floor of Skills USA eager to compete. Seventeen thousand spectators were on hand to watch 84 different competitions on an auditorium floor about 11 football fields long and seven wide. But the Niagara BOCES students were in a concentrated world of their own.
Brauer described the contest as something like this: Give a team of trusted workers 8 hours to accomplish what could easily take ten or fifteen. Then half way through the day, throw in a curve ball change order that requires them to back track and redo work they had already completed.
“These kids literally worked their butts off the entire time,” Brauer said. “They probably got 80-90 percent of the way through the original task when they were given the revised piece (the curve ball change order). Then they got all the way through that. They had to do a lot of problem solving.”
When it was all done, three of 46 state champion teams were standing on a platform. The team from Orleans\Niagara BOCES was in the center, each smiling member with a gold medal around his or her neck. |