The Owensboro Innovation Academy hosted a check presentation ceremony Tuesday, celebrating the $42,000 Toyota: Preparing our Students for Futures with Innovations STEM Opportunities grant that was awarded by Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Indiana. The grant will help fund a new computer-generated manufacturing class, which will be the first class of its kind being taught to Owensboro students.
“Toyota is known for innovation and ideas,” said Beth Benjamin, OIA Director. “We want to create educational opportunities that involve critical thinking, specifically in the STEM world.”
STEM is a curriculum based on educating students in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math. Facilitators at OIA integrate the STEM subjects by guiding students through a learning paradigm focused on critical thinking, hands-on projects, and developing minds to achieve a wide array of problem-solving techniques.
The grant-funded computer integrated manufacturing class will be “a very high-tech program,” she said. “Skills and careers that use this knowledge are very much in demand in this area. Students usually have to wait until college to take this kind of class.”
As part of the Project Lead the Way curriculum, juniors and seniors participating in the program with a desire to work in an industrial manufacturing career with Toyota, will be given priority consideration at OCTC and Vincennes University to pursue their education in the field of Computer Integrated Manufacturing.
Students at OIA must take two basic engineering classes as freshmen and sophomores. As juniors, they move toward classes focused on civil engineering and engineering design and development.
“We’re the first here in our area to offer this,” said Stephanie Gray, Engineering Facilitator at OIA. “This class uses a lot of the programming that a lot of manufacturing companies, like Toyota, use. The manufacturing industry is a lot different than it was even ten years ago.”
Gray believes many people have a common misconception about the manufacturing industry–namely that it involves assembly-line work and doing the same thing day in and day out.
“Manufacturing is not a mindless thing,” she says. The new class being funded by the Toyota STEM Opportunities grant will serve as an avenue to advocate the problem-solving and computer operation skills required to work for manufacturing companies like Toyota.
