Glenbrook South has been given an opportunity to be a part of a brand new competition called PACK Challenge. This opportunity is brought to us by PMMI and will culminate at the Pack Expo trade show at McCormick place from October 23-26.
This year’s competition will be related to bottle filling which is a huge sector of the packaging industry. Students will be given a chance to work with real world products and companies in addition to making connections with industry professionals.
We began working on this project with a field trip to Spee-Dee Packaging Machinery on June 10th. We were given a facility tour and the prototype for this year’s competition was unveiled at the end of it. This was our big kick off celebration to get things started. We then had a second field trip to Morrison Container Handling Solutions where they hosted a build day for all the teams that also included some on site training from Siemens for the programming aspect of the project.
From there we as a team continued to meet throughout the summer with virtual design meetings and in person build days at GBS. The team is composed of Sophomore, Junior and Senior Engineering students and we are looking to add students from our Marketing and Accounting Classes to help round out our team.
Coming up with a design that will successfully fill bottles with marbles is just one half of the competition. We also have to come up with a reason and a business plan for why we are filling bottles with marbles in the first place. We have several ideas currently in development but we are not ready to go public with any details at this time for the sake of the competition of course.
There are 6 high schools participating in this pilot competition including local rivals Elk Grove HS and Niles North HS.
Our very own Mr. Zummo has been serving on a special committee with the PMMI organization as the Educational Lead for the development of this competition following the success of our Robotic Arm Business Card Laminator project from last school year which was showcased at Pack Expo 2021 in Las Vegas.
We are hoping that this competition will usher in a new wave of excitement and interest for students to consider potential careers in the realms of packaging and manufacturing.
Participants included Domenica Collaro, Maya Goldberg, Alisha Deshpande, Samantha Kleiner, Areg Gevorgyan, Alexander Atanassov, Patrick Kuprewicz, and Norbert Zarski – Team Leader
Results:
We finished overall in 2nd place for Best in Show! We also placed 2nd in the sub innovative design category and 3rd in the marketing/sales category. Our placement came with a cash award of $4,000 for our Engineering Club program.
