On April 7th, 2016, select students of the STEM program at LCHS attended a field trip to Tennessee Technological University. 54 students and 4 chaperones– Mrs Harris, Mr Smith, Mrs Sims, and Mr Woerner–all attended the trip.

The students were split into three groups and experienced many different views of the TTU campus, mostly focusing on engineering. They got to see many of the areas where engineering students actually work on and build projects.

One of the areas the students visited was the iCube center on campus. At iCube, many companies come to Tennessee Tech asking about problems that need to be solved or projects that their company needs to make, and these are assigned to groups of students at iCube. There are 99 projects currently in action, including programs involving virtual realities, like the Oculus Rift, and projects from the Tennessee Aquarium.

There was another section of the campus under the football stadium bleachers where a group of students were constructing a car from scratch to compete in a competition with other colleges across the state.

Marissa Ballinger (10), an engineering student, was one of the members that attended the trip. “I really liked the cave [iCube]. It was a really cool virtual reality experience, and it was really lifelike,” she said. “I’m probably more likely to attend Tech now because I was really impressed by their engineering department, and that’s the field I want to go into,” she said.

Mrs. Harris  was one of the teachers that helped plan the Tennessee Tech trip.

“For a couple of years Mr. Woerner has been wanting to get a good engineering contact at tennessee tech because they have a really strong engineering program, and historically have had, and we also have a really strong engineering program,” she said.

“Traditionally most of our students go to UT, which also has a great engineering school, but we just wanted students to see the different options,” she said. There have already been several trips to UT this year. “The purpose of the trip was to get a contact with TN tech, and to expose our students to what they have offered at TN tech, because we have taken several trips to UT and so our engineering students are more familiar with that, but they were not as familiar as tech,” she said.
Trips like this help students get involved with other colleges and explore their options for their career after high school- that is why this trip was scheduled, and hopefully there are many more to come.