LEETONIA The Leetonia school district will offer a robotics club for county districts through its manufacturing academy beginning this school year.

At a meeting this week regarding the manufacturing academy piloted at the Leetonia K-12 campus during the 2016-2017 school year, Leetonia Schools Superintendent Rob Mehno announced the academy will offer a robotics club for Columbiana County school districts. With the approximately $9,000 remaining from an Local Government Innovative Fund (LGIF) grant to pilot the manufacturing academy last year, the program will be providing a Vex Robot and professional development to each county district. A final competition would be held in the spring.

He said he hopes the robotics club will pique the interest of students for the academy, which offers a credentialed path to graduation for students at each county school.

The Vex Robot provides hands-on curriculum to develop problem solving skills and learn programming foundations, according to Mehno.

With the Vex Robot, students will learn to assemble the robot, plus the programming curriculum to prepare the robot for autonomous tasks. The robot will also have to be modified for competition, which will incorporate fundamentals such as math by requiring students to program distances.

Its an introduction into what programmers actually do in the real world, Mehno said. The goal is for students to understand how to code and move onto other activities such as creating apps. They are developing the background to move forward.

VEX kits inspire students to become the problem solvers of the future. The VEX EDR system creates the excitement of building robots to immerse students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) concepts, said Rob Smith, consultant for IST Ohio, which provided the robot kits. VEX EDR can be integrated into the classroom or used as a stand-alone teaching tool in after-school robotics clubs. Versatile construction elements allow for multiple solutions to accomplish the same goal. The vex components are built around each other to ensure seamless integration without frustration.

The competition provides the platform that enables students to strive to be what they want to be. They compete at regional, then state, and if they are up to the challenge, even qualify and compete at VEX worlds. The VEX Competition provides multiple learning skills both hard and soft-skills. Teamwork is key. We are generating the workforce for the future.

Beyond the Vex Robot, Mehno said he sees the program advancing to the Ramtec industrial credentialed robot for the club. The Ramtec (Robotics & Advanced Manufacturing Technology Education Collaborative) robot is a proven collaboration for meeting Ohios training needs in advanced manufacturingaerospace and aviation, polymers and chemicals, biohealth, agribusiness and Food Processing and Automotive, according to information provided by Smith.

John Dilling of the Columbiana County Educational Service Center, the manufacturing academys fiscal agent, said the robotics club will be looking at professional development in December with the competition in the spring.

khowell@salemnews.net

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