Manufacturing Day gives CPS students hands-on experience

Some Chicago Public Schools students got to learn a few things outside the classroom last week, and their study materials were a lot bigger than a stack of textbooks.

One thing they studied was a hulking box called the NZ-2000. It’s made by DMG Mori, a Japanese company. It boasts a 12-axis turn/mill system, and it’s designed for complex, high-precision mass manufacturing. It’s used in medical, aerospace and military technologies.

In layman’s terms, it’s a machine for making things.

About 50 CPS high school students enrolled in manufacturing classes got a good look at the NZ-2000 and other industrial machines at Manufacturing Day, a local event organized by World Business Chicago and UI Labs.

The research and development center of UI Labs occupies 94,000 square feet of the former Republic Windows & Doors facility, 1333 N. Hickory Ave., on Goose Island. It opened in May.

Students were brought to the center Friday to see “the factory of the future,” said Haley Stevens, a UI Labs official.

“The image of manufacturing . . . it’s dirty. You look at old photos, all you see is dirty faces,” said David Blackmon, a CPS employee. “It’s not that way anymore. It’s a thinking man’s job.”

Through the CPS Career & Technical Education program, students gain industry certifications in fields such as manufacturing or culinary arts. CPS offers 46 career programs across its high schools, Blackmon said.

Students from two high schools participated in the event: Bowen High School, on the South Side, and Prosser Career Academy, on the Northwest Side. Blackmon said those schools are being outfitted with hands-on labs on their campuses that feature robot control arms, 3-D printers and virtual welding stations.

Trista Bonds, who teaches classes in manufacturing and engineering at Bowen, said she is optimistic about the career programs’ value.

The program helped transform Jarell Cunningham, a 16-year-old Bowen student, “into someone optimistic about the future, someone excited to learn,” she said.

“I want to be an engineer,” Jarell said. “I want to work with manufacturing and machinery.”

On a tour of the demonstration floor, Jarell leapt at the opportunity to work hands-on with a state-of-the-art instructional system. How-to videos projected onto a tabletop showed him how to fit together components of a diesel engine’s fuel injector. Light sensors signaled a loud buzzer whenever he reached for the wrong part.

“Before I just did it on the computer,” Jarell said. “That was the real thing.”

“I’ve got a lot of friends who want to work with engineering,” said Tavarius McNair, another 16-year-old student. Visiting the factory “would help them.”

“It would boost people’s motivations to work in this field,” Tavarius said. “You can see that there’s more out there than just Microsoft.”