Students from nearby Thomas Middle School (Arlington Heights School District 25) came to GAM for a job shadow as a part of their Careers Connection class. The Careers Connection class is a three part program designed to help prepare students for the work force by introducing career options as well as identifying their interests and strengths. Students take surveys, participate in discussion groups, and then have an on-site job shadow experience. "We enjoy participating in this program with Thomas Middle School because we get to help students learn and get excited about engineering and manufacturing," said Craig Van den Avont, President of GAM, "It's extremely rewarding to know that GAM played a positive role in the lives of the next generation of engineers."
They started off watching a presentation to help them understand what engineers do, what products they design, and what problems they solve.
After the presentation, they were tasked with designing a part.
The part that they were to design was a spool to keep their headphone cables organized.
The students used calipers to check dimensions and to make sure the design would have the correct tolerances.
From there, they worked with engineering to take the design concept and then build a 3D model in Solidworks.
Once the design met their approval, it was sent to the 3D printer for prototype production.
In about an hour, they had a working prototype that they got to keep.
