SME and Stratasys announced the winners of the cosponsored 2022 Additive Manufacturing (AM) Competition, conducted as part of the 58th annual SkillsUSA National Leadership and Skills Conference, held in Atlanta. The competition was supported this year by partners nTopology Inc. and Allegheny Education Systems.
Three high school and three college teams received top honors in the AM competition, created in 2013 by SME and Stratasys. The contest is intended to both educate high school and postsecondary students about AM technologies and its design, and to provide them with real-world, hands-on experience that they can apply to a commercial product.
In addition to the AM competition, all 70 students participated in a certification. The Additive Manufacturing Fundamentals Certification Exam was administered to all students free of charge and was included as a percentage of the total points for each competing team. This exam is the first and only certification validating an individual's knowledge of industry-standard concepts in AM, based on revisions to the Additive Manufacturing Body of Knowledge by the Additive Manufacturing Leadership Initiative (AMLI) in 2016.
Despite the challenging nature of this portion of the competition, an impressive 23 students of the 70 in attendance passed the Additive Manufacturing Fundamentals Certification Exam, and 12 students missed by only 1 point. This portion of the competition displayed the extraordinary knowledge that these students have (and continue to develop) for AM.
"It is important for Stratasys to attend challenges like SkillsUSA, mainly because the young kids that attend are going to be the kids in five to 10 years who come work at Stratasys," said Thomas Whiting, Application Engineer at Stratasys. "The more we can do now to prepare them, the better off they will be-and we as a manufacturer will be-in the future."
Both levels of the winning teams received gold, silver and bronze medals from SkillsUSA, as well as scholarships of $1,500, $1,000 and $500, respectively, from the SME Education Foundation. Both levels also received a one-year subscription for Tooling U-SME classes and a one-year SME membership, plus post-secondary winners received RAPID + TCT full-conference passes. Gold-medal-winning teams in both categories won a professional-grade Sketch 3D printer as well.
2022 winners of the SME/Stratasys SkillsUSA Additive Manufacturing Competition:
- High School Winners
- -Gold Team, Alejandro Colon and Daniel Hulse, West - MEC NWC Surprise, AZ
- -Silver Team, Keegan Phillips and Jason Todd, Spokane Valley Tech Spokane Valley, WA
- -Bronze Team, Martin Mendoza and Daniel Palma, Cypress Bay High School Weston, FL
- Post-Secondary Winners
- -Gold Team, Sarahi Lopez and Zach Covington, Wayne State College Wayne, NE
- -Silver Team, Zachary Stansifer and Andrew King, Tulsa Technology Center Broken Arrow, OK
- -Bronze Team, Benjamin Collier and Dallin Hansen, Utah Valley University Orem, UT.
- In all, more than 6,500 career and technical education students - all SkillsUSA state contest winners - competed in 108 different hands-on trade, technical and leadership fields during the national conference.
For more information contact:
SkillsUSA
www.skillsusa.org
Stratasys
www.stratasys.com
SME Headquarters
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Dearborn, MI 48128
800-733-4763
www.sme.org