Supporting High School Robotics Offers a Win-Win for JBM Technologies

Students, from left: Kyle Hoffman, James Bizjak, Jaiben Walker, Chloe Lippert, Wyatt Barzak, Landon Moore, Lance Axton. These seniors chose to design a new bot with a culmination of all they had learned through their high school years, working out of class, after school, and during Saturday work sessions to get it ready for competition.

MDNA member JBM Technologies has been supporting a local high school robotics team for more than a decade now, and the results are beginning to speak for themselves. Last year, one of their sponsored teams at Cochranton High School, “Bad Company,” seized both the first place and grand championship titles with their bot, Death Punch. The team also snagged an award for the best engineered bot in the nation.
 
Capturing these coveted honors is no small feat. According to the National Robotics League (NRL), “The competition featured the fiercest battles in NRL history to determine which school team built the meanest, strongest, most impenetrable, remote-controlled 15-pound robot in the nation.”
 
The arena-based competition tests students’ skills in one-on-one combat with robots designed to deliver total destruction. Unlike other types of robotics competitions, students competing in the National Robotics League design, machine, and code their robots from scratch and are judged based on innovation, engineering design, documentation, sportsmanship, and the “cool” factor.  
 
According to JBM Technologies’ general manager, Steve Preston, “students work on three main components for their robot, including weapons, armor (protective materials), and mobility.” Those three components work together to form a final solution, one the teammates hope will enable them to emerge victorious at the end of each match.
 
But the program is designed to do more than produce an award-winning robot. “Our hope is to use the robotics program to engage students in hands-on experiences that could eventually lead to a career in manufacturing,” Preston said.
 
In other words, participation in robotics is designed to increase students’ exposure, engagement, enrollment (in a post-high school robotics program), and eventual employment in a manufacturing-related field. “Kids that come out of the NRL are very solid,” he said. Some have become engineers and physicists. Another went on to run machine shops.
 
“In our industry,” said Preston, “we run into hires who haven’t operated hand tools or torn things apart growing up, and it shows.” The robotics program gives students real, hands-on exposure and provides a start in a direction that leads students into manufacturing and engineering career paths.
 
The students at Cochranton High School, for instance, have gained exposure to 3-D modeling, benchtop CNC mills and lathes, robotic arms, a vision system, and a gripper. “Their advisor, Christopher Yost, has really advanced the program year over year,” said Preston. “Students definitely gain an understanding of what’s it like to be part of a team in the real-world business culture of manufacturing.”
 
JBM Technologies’ investment in the program offers a secondary benefit to the company as well. “One of the biggest things I hear from people is that they want to buy from companies who support the local community. When they see a company investing and standing with students in the pits, helping them set up and tear down, and serving as a technical advisor group, they really appreciate that commitment to the local community.”
 
Clearly, JBM Technologies is scoring a win-win with their sponsored, championship robotics team, investing in the future of the industry and offering a solid commitment to the local community at the same time.