To help students learn about manufacturing and the importance of high-tech machine maintenance, ATS has developed a fun, hands-on exercise! It is our goal to take this exercise and other innovative activities into classrooms to engage students in exploring career possibilities at an early age.
In the ATS exercise, the students are divided into two or three competing teams. Each student in the class has a hands-on role to play. On each team, five of the students pretend to be a machine or robot on an assembly line. Each team is tasked with building widgets from raw materials in an assembly-line fashion. Each student “machine” has a part that they assemble and send down the line to the next machine. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if things always ran so smoothly? Throughout the game, the ATS facilitator announces machine breakdowns that can slow down production of the widgets. When a “machine” breaks down, that student can no longer work on the assembly line until the Maintenance Technician fixes the machine. The Maintenance Technician must work through and solve a class-related math problem before the machine can go back into operation. Each team also has a Quality Control Analyst to ensure that each product will pass final inspection, a Safety Manager to keep track of how many finished products the team has safely manufactured, an Environmental Assurance Specialist who tears down and recycles the parts for reuse, and a Parts Distribution Specialist who redistributes the parts to the correct machines. Since manufacturing today is so competitive, the team who makes the most completed widgets during the activity wins!
Among the lessons learned, students learn about the manufacturing process and the important skills necessary for maintaining sophisticated, high-tech machinery used in factories today. Students also learn the importance of good problem solving skills as the ATS facilitator relates their classroom studies to real world applications.