The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
STUDENTS SHOWCASE WORK WITH SKILLSUSA
High school students attend showcase to gauge skills before state competition
Students of Mentor High School and Lake Shore Compact are engaging in real world experience at the same time as they vie for a chance at the SkillsUSA state competition for career and technical students.
Mentor High School’s Programming and Software Development pathway is a twoyear program at Lakeland Community College, which allows students to pursue career-based projects from start to finish.
Projects are about eight weeks long and during the process, senior students have the opportunity to partner with local businesses.
On March 20, students involved in a dozen IT-focused projects and one welding project presented their work at a SkillsUSA Expo event in Lakeland. According to Melinda O’Connor, Mentor’s Programming and Software Development instructor, the showcase was open to community members as well as competition judges.
O’Connor said that the students provide real solutions for the businesses they work with.
“The senior year, they partner with a company in order to
deliver an IT solution,” she said. “The junior year, they have more creative flexibility — they can come up with their own prototype; their own concept.”
One senior group developed an app called “Valkyrie” that aids first responders by sharing the user’s location and providing built-in medical emergency information, as well as an automatic 911 call button.
All three of the companies who worked with students this year decided to
back the Valkyrie project, O’Connor said. The project’s team members added that they came up with the idea during their junior year and are building a new version of the app from scratch this year.
Dolbey Systems Inc. in Concord Township is one of the companies that worked with the students developing the app, as well as other groups.
“As a company, since we started it, we’ve found a lot of value in it,” said Tiffany Smith, talent acquisition and administrator for client services. “Every year (students) have done something that’s actually very solid and can
be used in business.”
She highlighted that, every day, employees of Dolbey use a check-in board that was designed by past students.
Another senior student project worked to redesign the website of Wilde Enterprises. The students noted that the project has helped them learn new skills related to their career interests.
“This kind of gave me an insight at what I could be expecting when I go into IT,” said Zachary McWilliams. “We had a meeting with him (the owner of Wilde) every Tuesday and every week he would give us our task. He’d review and then he’d also
give us constructive criticism in what we were doing, what weren’t we doing, what we should stop doing.”
“For me, as a developer, I’m learning code,” said Shemar Cox, “I need that logic to make a (video) game... That’s what I’m learning, learning how to write a lot of code.”
He added that he used W3Schools tutorials to learn HTML and CSS coding languages during the course of the project.
Annabelle Skebe and Avery White worked together on a project for Progressive insurance, which required them to hack their own website in order to learn more about online security. Although
it was a real website, it was constructed specifically for the project and the hacking was done with purpose.
“(Progressive) gave us the direction to go,” White said, “they didn’t tell us what to do.”
“Or how to do it,” Skebe added. “It was up to us.”
They both added that they decided for themselves on some of the software programs to use for the project.
During the expo, officials judges visited student tables to judge projects. Based on the judges’ evaluation, O’Connor said she will decide which teams advance to the SkillsUSA state competition.
“From their results, I get to determine who goes into career pathways showcase for business and IT,” O’Connor said. “I usually get to send one or two teams, depending on numbers.”
She added that teams in entrepreneurship, interactive application and video game design, cyber security, web design, computer programming and more have a chance to move up.
“With SkillsUSA, the traditional route is we have a regional competition,” O’Connor added. “This (expo) kind of helps us figure out the straight-to-state events.”