Engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have been awarded a two-year base development contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to provide manufacturing education programs to high school students. The base development contract includes about $1 million for the first year, with the potential of $10 million over four years to expand the project.

Engineering faculty at Georgia Tech will provide prize-based, educational challenges for high school students encouraging them to use the latest technology to design and build items like wind-turbine blades, mobile air and ground robots and electric car bodies– hopefully inspiring the next generation of manufacturers. The project is part of DARPA’s larger Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (MENTOR) program. MENTOR is aimed at bolstering the U.S. manufacturing industry by sparking teens’ interest in engineering, design, manufacturing, math and science-related university programs. Georgia Tech is one of several organizations awarded a contract from DARPA to help with the initiative.

“We want to change the mindset out there about manufacturing,” said David Rosen, Georgia Tech professor of mechanical engineering and co-principal investigator on the contract. “We’re trying to use the latest technologies to attract a new generation into the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) areas and the manufacturing career field.” Georgia Tech’s program will focus on introducing students to design and manufacturing processes by using 3D printers and adaptive manufacturing. Social media will also play a role. Students will be connected via social networking sites and form teams that will compete to showcase their work. 

For the first two years of the grant, Georgia Tech will be working to get ten high schools in Georgia involved in the program.  The goal is to expand the program to 100 high schools across the country by year four and 1,000 high schools globally within five years. Georgia Tech will be working with key partners to make the program a reality.

The program will be build on the Engineering Design Summer Camp that has been conducted for the past four years in Georgia Tech’s Integrated Product Lifecycle Engineering (IPLE) Laboratory in Aerospace Engineering. Expanding the program to hundreds of high schools could help create a resurgence of manufacturing in the U.S., researchers said.

“What we’re trying to do is make manufacturing an attractive career path,” said Daniel Schrage, professor and director of the IPLE Laboratory and co-principal investigator on the contract. “A lot of students in college don’t look at manufacturing as the choice of jobs; they rather go into design or analysis. You can have the most beautiful design, but if you can’t build it and you can’t operate, it’s not successful. So we’re trying to change the culture from that perspective.”