Educational Partnerships & Collaboration
As a recent college graduate, I had the opportunity to work with companies on different marketing projects. As a new member of the Design Ready Controls team, I quickly noticed how involved they are with all their educational partners and collaborations. Their level of engagement and passion for collaboration inspired me to write this blog to provide a high-level overview of a few I found the most interesting.
University of St. Thomas
Through an electrical engineering capstone class at the University of St. Thomas – a group of students and their professors worked alongside our engineering team to research how generative AI could be implemented into manufacturing, specifically at Design Ready Controls.
The project launched this year, and quickly kicked off to include trailing code and finding new concepts to apply AI in manufacturing.
Over the course of several months, the students collaborated with multiple departments to create a concept for the use as a part recognition system. The project was completed at the end of the semester, and from there our team started implementing the system into our process.
Spring Lake Park High School
A group of students enrolled in the Spring Lake Park High School Business Program partnered with our marketing team to create a comprehensive campaign inspiring students to explore manufacturing and careers within. The students completed industry research, interviewed Design Ready Controls employees, and developed a six-month campaign that contained both video and graphics. The collaboration between the students, employees, and the marketing team brought the next level of excitement and energy to talking about manufacturing.
Bemidji State University
A group of our talented engineers have been working on a project with the Emphasis Related Capstone class from Bemidji State University. This research project ran this past spring and was focused on analyzing Design Ready Controls’ previous data to determine efficiency over time, and any beneficial trends. It’s been a great experience with great lessons learned, the students provided great insight and recommendations.
Based on the recommendations that resulted from this project, Design Ready Controls will be exploring how to better identify and compartmentalize the products they build. Likewise, exploring a more effective means to calculate estimated hours for the highly variable, complex units they build.
Overall Tips/Considerations
- Ensure consistent alignment and communication throughout the project.
- Establish clear-cut goals beforehand and understand students and their schedules.
- In-person vs online classes require different types and methods of successful communication.
Student Quote
One of the students, Corissa, said she really enjoyed designing a system that would provide helpful electrical component recommendations to solve real-world problems. When asked about her key takeaways Corissa said, “This project taught me the value of persistence and creativity. Sometimes it was difficult when the code that we wrote would break or we didn’t know why some suggested components were not correct. To find a solution, persistence was a useful skill to keep making progress throughout the course of the project until we found a solution. Creativity was important because of the brainstorming and teamwork that took place to design a program that incorporated the desired functionality for the system.”
Closing
Projects like these provide students with real-world experience they wouldn’t normally get in a classroom. Being hands-on with a company in a school environment allows kids to utilize the skills that teachers/professors have been teaching, and learning to actually apply them.
