Vernier’s STEM project

AMTIL’s Education Forum is a good first start to build on!.

With nearly 16,000 visitors, AMTIL’s Australian Manufacturing Week was a great success in reinforcing how important manufacturing is to the economy. But the apprentice and skill shortages still remain the biggest challenge for the industry.

It was great to see the number of high school students attending the exhibition. Their badge ‘Future Employee’ may be premature though. The Exhibition can get their attention but the industry needs to capture their ‘hearts and minds’.

One small organisation attempting to do this is the Vernier Foundation, who were invited by AMTIL to run an Education Forum at the show. The Foundation is a selffunded charity and the philanthropic arm of the long established Vernier Society. Their purpose is to promote STEM in schools and build pathways into careers in engineering and manufacturing. The Education Forum was built around a competition introducing students to the complexities of innovative manufacturing and featured the Forum’s sponsors and in particular its major sponsor, OKUMA Australia.

The event was in two parts. The students first heard from three young inspirational engineers about their engineering careers and how they were influencing the future. Avishka Wickamarachchi, currently doing a PhD at Monash and working with the medical teams on developing improved artificial hearts. Dr Morley Muse, co-founder of iSTEM Co., a research and talent sourcing business to encourage women into STEM, and George Juliff co-founder and COO of Ai-Nc a company developing machining software. The students were then asked to explain in one sentence how they wanted to influence the future. The second involved understanding all the manufacturing operations involved in making a part being machined on the OKUMA stand. Having studied the machining process, the students then visited Dimac Tooling to understand the Lang fixturing; how to measure the part at Renishaw Oceania, the tooling needed at Sutton’s and finally at ASA Pty Ltd., to understand automation using robots. The competition was then for the students’ post show to produce 700 word essay explaining the whole process sequence.

The competition prizes attracted significant entries and the standards were so high that it was hard for the Vernier judges to select the winners of the four top prizes. As Dean McCarroll MD of OKUMA said, “To say some of the entrants were as young as 12, the standard was quite impressive!” In the end, the judges awarded the first prize to a young student from Dandenong High School.

AMTIL’s willingness to encourage schools to attend the exhibition and to introduce the Education Forum were great initiatives and something to build on at the next show. STEM teachers say while schools can provide some education in Technology and Engineering, the students can really benefit from exposure to the ‘real world of manufacturing’. The Vernier Foundation wants to alleviate this weakness by expanding its schools ‘Factory Visit’ program and to provide more industry expertise directly to the schools in the form of educators and mentors. There are some challenges though. The schools already face a packed curriculum, particularly in year 11 and 12 but this can be alleviated with forward planning. The challenge for the Foundation is that it is only a volunteer organisation and only funded by its member companies. It is now looking to increase the number of participating schools, expand its membership base and gain more volunteers.

The Foundation concludes there are no short term answers to the skill shortages despite the government’s rhetoric. It has been a decade in the making and will take ten years to solve, so attracting the current high school students is so important to the industry. Alternative career opportunities for students are significant and so the manufacturing industry must step up to attract these young people. To achieve this there must be a more collective commitment amongst all involved in the industry and AMTIL and organisations like the Vernier Foundation are ideally placed to lead this commitment.

Education Forum Details

The Foundation currently sponsors two schools – Dandenong High School, which is one of the largest secondary units in Victoria with a high immigrant and refugee student populations. After six years of development, they now run an Advanced Engineering Academy for their STEM students. The second school is St Margaret’s Girls School Berwick who are a private school just starting on the STEM journey by setting up an after-school STEM club.

The Vernier Foundation sponsoring companies were; major sponsor OKUMA Australia, Thermashield, Dimac Tooling, Amiga Engineering, Renishaw Oceania, Selectronic and ASA Pty Ltd. vernier.org.au