It’s your senior year and you’ve already taken all of the elective classes that interest you in your first- three years. This 2017-2018 school year, NUHS has added a new course to it’s Industrial Tech Department: Mechatronics. The class starts off the morning and engages every student in its concepts of Hydraulics, Pneumatics, Robotics, and Automation. The course is a mostly hands-on learning with different trainers (systems that are used to train it’s operators) all provided by 3M, the local manufacturing plant in New Ulm. The course instructor Kevin Briggs, who is also new to the world of Mechatronics, was sent to 3M for training several times during the first part of the school year.

As the school year winds down, the Mechatronics’ students are tackling their automation unit. This is where the students use special software on their computers to program their trainers to perform a certain task. Senior Tyler Roufs noted, “It’s cool to see how the machines that make the products we use everyday are programmed, and also to see the simple concepts of how they work.”

Although the Industrial Tech department is dominated by mostly male students, the Mechatronics class contains a few ladies and should be considered by all students.