[moresnowdays]

I'm a Technology teacher in central New York. We have a good program for the 7-12 grade students with a nice variety of electives at the high school level. In the 7th and 8th grade our program is very hands on, and set up to meet the State Ed. mandates. In addition to our regular 8th grade program we have established an advanced Technology course that gives students a taste of Engineering. It's a short course, about 10 weeks, and they get familiar with some basics of Autocad Inventor. The goal of the course is to simply get kids hooked on Math, and Engineering.

I was thinking it would be really exciting for them to be able to develope a simple product in Inventor and then be able to produce it with a CNC setup. Could make this course that students have either really liked, while others seem to drift off while on the computer, into a course that is really in demand by students. I think the kids of this level like designing in the computer at first, but really lose interest once they realize they can't produce something to bring home. Producing tangible products in the regular Middle school courses have always kept them exciting for the kids.

We have the computers and software. We also have the space for a milling machine in our dedicated lab for this class. The only thing lacking is figuring out what CNC machine we would need to run with this, funding for it, and then teaching myself to use it.