An incredible Christmas gift

MT. PLEASANT - The Mt. Pleasant Community High School career and technical education department recently received a new toy: a $45,000 automated robot arm donated by Jabil Packaging in Mt. Pleasant.

Larry Todey, a Jabil representative, said the company donated a robot arm to the high school as well as other robots to local community colleges including Southeastern Community College and Indian Hills. Todey said the company hopes to try and promote automation training and learning in the area schools.

'We donated it to these learning institutions because we want to expose students to technical training and technical training possibilities that they might run into when they come to work in a factory like this,” Todey said.

The robot arm is built to work alongside people in factory settings and is used to complete mundane and repetitive tasks. The robots are used in many types of factory settings, Colby Newman, the high school industrial technologies teacher who spearheaded the robot project, said.

'It's top-of-the-line as far as the robots go. [You can] program it to do just about anything. I'm excited to see what some of the students down there do with it,” Newman said.

The robot is incredibly safe as well and is designed with the safety of factory workers in mind. The machine will shut down if it feels too much force.

'It may leave a bruise, but it's not going to knock you out or knock your block off,” Newman said.

The robot arm is aimed at helping students prepare for the workforce and helping them develop skills they might need during their careers.

'They're always in need of people who are willing to work on or program automation in factories,” Newman said.

'It would be good to get students interested in that line of work, and some of the things here in high school so that they can see some of the cool careers that come with them,” he added.

Although Newman and other shop teachers have some work to do before the machine can become a major part of their class curriculum, the CTE department is excited and hopeful about their new piece of tech.

'We aim just to teach students how to program it, how to code it, and how to do different operations. It can be really fun and really neat to see your program take shape and use all of the commands,” Newman said.