Instructor Noah Lukiewicz and students from the Medford Vocational Technical High School describe the technical skills, facilities, and career pathways offered by the Robotics and Engineering shop. The presentation highlights the shop's focus on fabrication and its preparation for college and industrial careers.
[Lukiewicz]: My name is Noah Lukiewicz. Students call me Mr. L. I teach robotics and engineering. The skills that students can learn in our shops, we kind of break it down into CAD work, which is computer-aided design, coding, circuitry, and then machine shop items.
[Barayuga]: I'd say my favorite aspect of this shop is working with a lot of people and collaborating to make cool projects. And a favorite project I've worked on is my stoplight because I've become part of the stoplight now and one with me.
[Lukiewicz]: Some of the interests for freshmen who are coming into the shop, I mean, in terms of engineering, there are unlimited sort of types of jobs you can do from structural engineer to electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, kind of can go on for each profession, but those include video game design, to music design, to creating products in terms of industrial design. So sort of any field that you can think of, there are engineers needed.
[Whealan]: I've always been interested in technology and just overall creating things, so whether that be doing stuff online or using different machines. And so when I went through the Voc Rotations freshman year and I knew that I wanted to use a little bit more of heavy machinery, which is what we have here, and so it kind of just drew me in pretty quickly.
[Lukiewicz]: Some of the highlights of the shop, well certainly this machine shop that we're in right now, as well as our sort of electronics lab with five 3D printers, two laser cutters, PCB mills, and then an array of dual monitor computers. So when students leave this shop, we try and offer a variety of options for them. So we kind of tell them about things beforehand. Certainly college is an option, and most of our students actually do go to four-year engineering colleges but we certainly have students who go right into the fields for manufacturing as well as certain military fields.
[Pahang]: My plan after high school is probably just to go to college and like practice one of the many engineering fields. Going into UMass Lowell so I was going there and I checked out this type of engineering it's a plastic engineering so I want to try that one out.
[Lukiewicz]: I think joining this shop gives students the ability to fabricate things, and that's a unique process that we have here in engineering. They can make anything they want. We don't sort of tell them what they have to make in here, and so they can really follow their dreams and become engineers.