Today was the first day of new freshmen for our shop. The way vocational schools work is to have freshmen do ‘rotations’ for the first part of the school year. Each school handles this differently, but our school has students interested in the vocational school do a rotation (a 4 day introduction to a shop) for each of the 15 shops we have at our school. After that students then choose which shop they would like to join for the rest of the year and hopefully for the rest of their time in high school.
Last year the Robotics & Engineering shop had a huge freshmen class, about 19 students, although that has dwindled to 16 currently. Our new group of freshmen is another group of 19. It’s great news, but a lot of students for us and will mean we are going to be bursting at the seams next year. We only have 20 works stations in the shop, so we will need to be creative as to how we enable all students to work on projects each day. Still, this is great news for the shop, and show how popular the new space we built is for the program. I will post some images of our new baby engineers over the next few weeks.