BRATTLEBORO — Students from the Windham Regional Career Center traveled to Burlington recently to attend the SkillsUSA Vermont state conference.
This is a yearly event, enabling students from career centers around the state to demonstrate the skills they have been learning in their technical programs. The SkillsUSA Vermont Championships have grown to more than 1,000 members and more than 50 hands-on skill and leadership contests.
Seven Career Center students attended this conference. They are Brooke Jarvis, a Brattleboro senior who is the vice-president and a state delegate for her local SkillsUSA chapter; Brandon Niemczyk, a junior from Brattleboro; Trevor Houle, a Brattleboro senior, who along with Adison Clark, a Dummerston junior, competed in the Criminal Justice contest; Drew Downs, a junior from Brattleboro who, along with Theresa Snow, a junior from West Dover, competed in the Firefighting contest; and Leon Ogden, a Guilford senior, who participated in the Technical Drafting competition.
Ogden won a gold medal, capturing first place statewide in his competition. Students in this event were given paper copies of mechanical plans that they needed to replicate into properly dimensioned 3-D models using Inventor, a computer-assisted design program from Autodesk.
Ogden said he felt that it was his experience with GD&T – geometric dimensioning and tolerancing – gained from courses he's taken at the Career Center that set him apart from the other competitors in this event.
According to Wikipedia, “GD&T is a system for defining and communicating engineering tolerances. It uses a symbolic language on engineering drawings and computer-generated three-dimensional solid models that explicitly describe nominal geometry and its allowable variation. It tells manufacturing staff and machines what degree of accuracy and precision is needed on each controlled feature of the part.”
As a result of his victory at the state level, Ogden will be attending the national SkillsUSA competition in Louisville, Ky., scheduled for the week after his graduation from high school this year.
Ogden has been involved in coursework at the Career Center since his freshman year at Brattleboro Union High School. His courses have included Architecture and Construction Graphics, Introduction to Engineering Design, Fiber Optics, Engineering Design & Development, Computer Integrated Manufacturing, Robotics & Automation, Architecture & Civil Engineering, and Principles of Biomedical Science.
Doug Bramble, one of Ogden's Career Center instructors, said, “right from the beginning, Leon has always been very inquisitive and ready to delve into any challenge I've given him. He's been a very serious student and, from a personal side, has shown a very nice sense of humor and has always been willing to take constructive criticism and use it to his advantage.”
According to a news release, Ogden will be attending college in the fall, with an intended major in biomedical engineering. He credits his Principles of Biomedical Science course, which is new this year at the Career Center, with providing him good insight into biomedical opportunities in the field of engineering, the release stated.