I Believe the Children are Our Future

One of my favorite songs from the eighties is “The Greatest Love of All,” the megahit by Whitney Houston. When I consider why I like this song so much, it’s the first line of the lyrics that just grabs me right away, “I believe the children are our future.” While this may seem like a very obvious statement, for those of us in manufacturing it’s an important concept to think about these days. We’ve all heard about (or are experiencing) the aging of the manufacturing workforce. At Okuma we often receive the comment “sure, I’d love to buy your machine, but only if you can give me a skilled operator to go with it.” This arouses some laughs and the nodding of heads, but the frustration is clearly a troubling dilemma.

Share These Online Resources

What can we do to get our younger generation interested in manufacturing? How do we get their attention at a young age and show them how rewarding it can be to “make things” for a living? I became curious (watch out Google, when I get curious!) about what online resources might be out there. Happily I found several websites for kids, parents, and schools, and here are a few of my favorites. I’m sharing these in the hope that you might share them too.

1. Lego^® Digital Designer
   For many children, creating things in a 3D environment begins with a set of Lego^® (or Duplo^®) bricks. Lego has taken this concept to the next level with their Lego Digital Designer software. This software, which is available free from the Lego website, features a palette of bricks and pieces in different colors that can be used to build any model imaginable. You can even print a parts list and use it to place an order on the Pick a Brick website and bring the project you created in the digital Lego environment to life.

    

2. NeoK12: How It’s Made
   NeoK12 is a website that is jam packed with educational videos, lessons, and games for K-12 students. Much of the content is free, but there’s also a “School Presentation” tool that lets teachers create dashboards with selected content and instructions that they can share online with their students. One section of this site that caught my eye is the How It’s Made page. Here you can see videos that have been pre-screened by educators to be appropriate for school-age children. It’s not uncommon for children to think that toothbrushes come from the store or that the windows on their homes come from the builder. Showing how things are made can open their eyes to the world of manufacturing, and how cool the technology can be.

    

3. Shapeways: Introduction to 3D Design & Printing for Kids
   The Shapeways website guides you through downloading the (FREE) 3D modeling software, getting comfortable in the 3D workspace, designing your project, and having it printed in 3D. The accompanying videos (shown in the photo above) are easy to understand and provide detailed information for every step of the process. This is REAL manufacturing on a miniature scale, made fun for kids.

    

4. Industry Parts Viewer
   While this is not a site specifically aimed at children, Okuma’s Industry Parts Viewer is a good resource to show young people how items we see every day—such as cars, airplanes, and oil rigs—are put together, and what types of parts are made on machine tools. The Industry Parts Viewer allows you to choose from the automotive, aerospace, and oil/energy industries to explore component parts and the CNC machine tool(s) that might be used to cut the specific parts. Once a part is selected, it’s shown in a 3D view and can be rotated 360°, allowing it to be explored from various angles. Clicking on an image of an assembly, for example a car engine, and watching it explode into all of its components is fun to do. While this tool was created as a tool for manufacturers to select the machine best suited for the part they’re manufacturing, I think this is a fun site for kids, too.

Now, back to Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All.” The second line of the lyrics is also quite inspirational:

I believe the children are our future
Teach them well, and let them lead the way.

When it comes to the children in our lives, I believe we need to use every tool available to teach them well. Then we can stand back and watch them lead the way.

Mindy Mikami is Marketing Coordinator, Okuma America Corporation.

Interesting Fact: While “The Greatest Love of All” was originally recorded by George Benson in 1977, it’s the 1985 Whitney Houston version that has become most famous.