Design, Engineering and Manufacturing Camp Wraps up its Fourth Year with 77 Attendees

From June 2-5, 2014, 77 local middle school students attended the fourth annual Design, Engineering, and Manufacturing (DEM) day camp at the Northwest Georgia College and Career Academy. The goal of the free camp was to spark an interest in manufacturing among local youth and show them the wide range of jobs and skills demanded in modern manufacturing, particularly in the floorcovering industry. 

At the camp, students had the opportunity to build and design wooden cars, create their own carpet designs, build a full scale hovercraft, use computer-assisted design (CAD) to create projects, explore career options, tour local floorcovering plants, and participate in team-building activities. 

The idea for a Design, Engineering & Manufacturing Camp emerged during Archway’s Higher Education Issue Work Group sessions in spring 2011.  At the meetings, citizens talked about the need to expose students at an early age to the variety of career options available to them.  A Leadership-Dalton Whitfield survey conducted during fall 2010 revealed that students had very low perceptions of local opportunities and did not understand the highly-skilled nature of many jobs.  Thanks to the vision and hard work of leaders Barbara Ward (Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce) and Brian Cooksey (Shaw Industries), the dream of DEM Camp became a reality in 2011 and continues to grow each year.

Photos courtesy of the Daily Citizen Newspaper can be viewed below. More about this year’s DEM camp can be read here. For more about the Dalton-Whitfield Archway Partnership’s involvement with the DEM day camp, click here.  

 Chris Forscutt drops an egg in an apparatus constructed by students during an engineering camp at the Northwest Georgia College and Career Academy. Student teams were given a paper bag with three drinking straws, cotton balls, tape, chewing gum, a length of string and a small balloon and were tasked with creating a device which could protect the egg in an 8-foot drop. (Matt Hamilton/The Daily Citizen)

 Audrey Webb, 11, Braeden Gallman, 11, and Nicholas Ruiz, 11, participate in the egg drop challenge at the Northwest Georgia College and Career Academy. (Matt Hamilton/The Daily Citizen)

 Brad Johnson with Mohawk demonstrates the use of a beam array as students use it to measure various objects at the Northwest Georgia College and Career Academy. (Matt Hamilton/The Daily Citizen)

Rachel Climer, 12, and Will Wright, 11, work to create a Lego object identical to one on a table across the room, obstructed from their view at the Northwest Georgia College and Career Academy. Students were separated into groups of “spies” and “builders.” The spies could look at the object and then had to run back across the room and describe it to the “builders.” (Matt Hamilton/The Daily Citizen)