A number of Wayne State College students involved in the SkillsUSA program have had success at competitions this year.
Zach Covington and Sarahi Lopez, sophomores at WSC earned National Championship honors in Additive Manufacturing (3D Printing) at competition earlier this year in Atlanta, Georgia.
Covington provided the following summary of the program, along with thoughts on his project for the competition.
In addition, Greg Vander Weil, advisor for the group, shared thoughts on the accomplishments.
"First off, SkillsUSA has been a great opportunity for me in the past five years with much different leadership and skill-developing activities. I was president of my chapter as a senior in high school, secretary as a freshman, and now the current president at Wayne State SkillsUSA," Covington said.
"As far as Additive Manufacturing and State SkillsUSA Sarhai and I worked on the "Lockbox challenge" It was a cylindrical shaped container with knobs that would lock the lid on the bottom of our container. This box had to roll, drop and hold $4 worth of change without breaking open," he said.
"At state, we also had a challenge of designing a coin sorter, in this challenge we went away from the traditional thoughts of a sorter where you dump a heap load of coins in and let gravity sort them into columns. Instead, we went the route that would help aid someone who is visually challenged. Our design was small and fit inside a wallet, the user would be able to grab a coin without knowing what it was and drag it along the piece of plastic until it fit into its desired hole. Each hole was labeled with the specific coin that it was. That way someone with this problem would easily be able to pay with their change. These were the winning designs for the additive manufacturing Nebraska state challenge," Covington said.
"At Nationals, which were held in Atlanta, Georgia, we had three eight-hour days to work on the different challenges they gave us. First, we were to design a motor box housing that had a motor, computer chip, and a fan in it. Our design had a snap-fit lid, an area around the motor for airflow, and small details like warnings along the side of the housing. We also had to lightweight a part they gave us, and follow a drawing they gave us to connect a whole assembly together from other competitors," he added.
"Going up on stage was one of the coolest moments I have been a part of. It was exciting being up there with the top three in the nation and to hear your name called out as the National Champions was very cool. Some of the things we received for winning were we each got a 3d Printer, a scholarship, and conference passes to an additive manufacturing conference in the spring," Covington said.
In Lincoln, the students were awarded the Commissioner of Education's award for Career and Technical Education Excellence.
"Overall these experiences have been very beneficial to me and my future as a Skilled and Technical Education Teacher (Shop Teacher), and I look forward to my future endeavors with SkillsUSA. I also recommend SkillsUSA to anyone to be a part of at the high school, and college levels because of the enormous amounts of different opportunities, and competitions there are," Covington said.
"These two outstanding Wayne State College Industrial Technology freshman Teacher Education majors beat out other teams, at State and Nationals, who are majoring in manufacturing and have a much more concentrated curriculum and opportunity to develop knowledge and skills in 3D printing. So to achieve this National Championship, they truly have exceptional skills and a lot of it came from Zach and Sarahi’s high school classes. That strong foundation along with the classes here at Wayne State College, helped achieve this first place finish in Additive Manufacturing," Vander Weil said.
"I’m excited to have them both on the path to being the next generation of Industrial Technology Teachers, future students will benefit from both Zach and Sarahi as their teachers," he added.
