 |
| |
| “We have done really well at Electrathon competitively; I won’t say it is just because we have the fancy equipment and Mastercam. I give the kids a lot of credit for their creativity. Having these tools allows our students to design and build things to incredibly close tolerances.” |
- Bruce Freeman, Instructor, Nathan Hale-Ray High School |
| |
|
|
 |
Nathan Hale-Ray High School in East Haddam, Connecticut, is a tiny four-year school with about 370 students. Conventional wisdom would tell us that not much could be done in the realm of technology education with the limited financial resources of such a small rural community. This school has proven otherwise. |
| |
In four of the past six years, seniors in Bruce Freeman’s Technology Education classes at the Nathan Hale Ray-HS (East Haddam, CT) have been winners in the regional Electrathon Vehicle Competition. This contest involves racing energy-efficient vehicles, not to see how fast they can go, but how far they can be driven in an hour with no battery replacements allowed.
The competition is the culminating activity of a program that starts out with rapid immersion into basic, then advanced, manufacturing technology. The pace is fast-- just as it is in the real world of manufacturing.
Some of the sophomore and junior students entering Freeman’s Introduction to manufacturing class may have already taken a CAD (Computer Aided Design) course, but most have not. He does not consider this to be a problem. He teaches the students CAD and CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) simultaneously.
Students are lead through a series of progressively difficult tasks in which they learn to draw and create manufacturing toolpaths for 2D objects and ultimately manufacture them using one of the school’s three CNC (Computer Numerical Control) routers. Freeman said it only takes the students two weeks to achieve a solid working familiarity with Mastercam and the routers.
Fast-forward to the Electrathon Competition. Freeman starts about a year ahead of the next competition getting his best CAD/CAM students familiar with designing exterior car surfaces by working with Mastercam’s C02 car program to become familiar with such concepts as “lofting”, “surfaces”, and creating optimal cutter toolpaths for aerodynamic designs. Then they create a scale model of next year’s design and refine it based on wind tunnel tests.
In the fall, Nathan Hale-Ray HS students begin scaling up and manufacturing their new vehicle design. Actually, there is nothing in the rules of the contest requiring the students to design or manufacture parts for their vehicle.
Today, however, it’s a point of pride. If the students can design and build it, they will. That even includes producing the sprockets for the chain drives, which are designed and toolpathed for CNC machining in Mastercam and cut from aluminum with a router.
The advantage of making your own parts is being able to find ways to manufacture to closer tolerances. This, in turn, reduces weight or friction so the vehicle will travel as far as possible.
Almost every March, Freeman starts to become a little concerned about all the pieces of the current year’s project coming together in time so that the kids can field a vehicle of their own design and manufacture for the competition in late May or early June. Freeman is not about to step in and rescue his class. It’s all about the students figuring out what needs to get done and doing it on schedule.
If the very worst happened, the kids would wind up competing with a vehicle the previous year’s class made. Making that adjustment would, in itself, be another learning experience.
|