SF, USC students continue real-world manufacturing work
EA Fab Corporation founder and operator, Pedro Quiroga, gave an impassioned speech to students problem-solving for his company, saying they need to learn what they want to learn and always stay ahead of the proverbial 8-ball. “Some didn’t think they didn’t need to go to digital designing and stuck with hand-drawing designs in the ’80s. What do you think happened to those companies?”
Student Eliza Brufsky tells of her team’s brainstorming through the LUMA method, which parsed out both problems and solutions along the way.
State Senator Camera Bartolotta, whose district office is in Southpointe, said, “Too often in the past and even today, schools are teaching kids to memorize. This is an example of what needs to be done at all schools, and that is to apply real-world problem-solving.”
First it was designing solutions for products manufactured by All-Clad. The collaborative encore for students from South Fayette and Upper St. Clair school districts included streamlining work flow, collating data from work submissions and developing formulas to accurately predict labor and production costs for EA Fab Corporation in Oakdale. The four- and five-member teams presented their project-based learning demonstrations that could easily pass as college-level and professional consultant work at California University’s Center for Innovation in Southpointe on March 18.
Before the students presented, EA Fab founder and operator, Pedro Quiroga, gave an impassioned speech that was so real-world, he had to put “no cursing” reminders on his slides.
“Study what you like the most. If life doesn’t afford you that opportunity, you have to make it one,” he said, “and the first step is learning how to learn. You’re more than accomplishing that here.”
Quiroga said he was impressed when one student group not only gave the basic presentation for the team’s problem of parsing out the types of documents customers send to the company, but built a phone and web browser application for anyone to use.
“My brother is a freshman in high school, and is very talented with building apps,” said student Eliza Brufsky. “So, I sat down with him and had him build us an app that we could use anywhere.”
“That’s your first lesson in outsourcing,” Quiroga joked.
The work that went into the app’s formula was still done by the entire team. The student group found each document type that would need to be presented to customers needing to track changes in 2-D and 3-D modeling submissions to the engineering department. So the team built the program that identifies the file types all in one space, allowing the correct version to be viewed.
In collaboration with the LUMA Institute, the project demos were the second of three presentations that are part of the Innovation Studio at South Fayette. The teams are using brainstorming methods that identify future and potential problems and other variables not typically seen in traditional workshop methods.
“The LUMA methods foster unseen connections and help you organize brainstorming in a more effective way so everyone can add to it, collaborate and act on the ideas … it’ll definitely help later in school and in college,” said student Vicki Wang.
The final presentations from South Fayette are a collaboration with North Allegheny School district and Alcosan to be presented March 31 at the CCAC Allegheny Campus.