Workplace Simulation
Career Academy Network of Public Schools, South Bend
Apparently, the sky’s not even the limit for Bend Manufacturing: After less than two years in operation, high schoolers in the student-led business are working alongside University of Notre Dame PhDs to produce equipment for NASA.
Granted, not all Bend Manufacturing projects involve producing airfoils for space program testing, but they do all give St. Joseph County teenagers opportunities to engage in authentic manufacturing experiences, from making business pitches to designing products and from balancing the books to running a production process.
Bend Manufacturing didn’t get off to such a fast start without an external boost. It was launched in 2024 after Career Academy Network of Public Schools, in conjunction with Boys & Girls Clubs, won a $4.4 million Explore, Engage, Experience grant from the Indiana Department of Education. That money supported investments in Industry 4.0 technology and equipment, including high-tech lathes, CNC machines and 3D printers. The program complements a network-wide emphasis on career training and work-based learning that begins in kindergarten.
The high schoolers who choose to participate in Bend Manufacturing as an elective find themselves immersed in a full-blown student-led business, where they and their peers oversee every aspect of operations for customers ranging from local small businesses to Notre Dame’s Turbomachinery Laboratory.
Scott Morris, who leads Turbo Lab and directs the Notre Dame Institute for Flow Physics and Control, says Bend Manufacturing’s small scale fits perfectly with his NASA project, which involves testing air flow around open rotors (propellers, in layman’s terms). Working with larger suppliers is inefficient, he says, because the program requires individual production runs.
“Everything’s done once,” he says. “You build something, you test it, you throw it away and you build something else.”
But it wasn’t just the ability to do such small project runs that impressed Moore. It was the quality of the products Bend Manufacturing delivered and the poise of the Career Academy students. He says it’s not uncommon for him to walk through the lab and hear one of the Bend Manufacturing kids explaining something to a PhD student or collaborating with the Notre Dame team to create solutions to problems.
“My PhD students, they’re studying aerodynamics or other things, so they know nothing about manufacturing,” Moore says. “The high school kids are experts in this.”
Moore has been so confident about the high schoolers that he isn’t afraid to give them bigger roles. Last summer, he had one of them give a 20-minute presentation to his research sponsors.
Career Academy CEO Jeremy Lugbill says those kinds of experiences are exactly what he wants for his Bend Manufacturing students – experiences that not only give them skills and knowledge but also let them spend enough time in the working environment to get a sense of what’s next in their career development. Many Bend Manufacturing participants graduate with industry accreditations and college credits, and more than half have gone directly into manufacturing careers. The rest have gone on to college or the military. All seem to have learned to shoot for the stars.
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