Betabox visits Hickory to build STEM skills, prepare workforce

By Ken Elkins kelkins@bizjournals.com Charlotte Business Journal

If the Hickory area wants to continue its manufacturing and innovation heritage, leaders have to convince young people to pursue careers in those industries, companies have told its industry seekers.

Scott Millar, president of the Catawba County Economic Development Corp., believes economic development starts with having schools that can attract the county’s future workforce to STEM classes as the population of the Charlotte region grows.

“We want the things that cause that mother to move to Catawba County when she moves to the Charlotte region,” he says. “If we have the most innovative educational initiatives, people will choose Catawba County.”

Millar brought the members of the economic-development agency’s Committee of 100, a leaders steering group, to see the Betabox on Tuesday.

Betabox: Mobile Prototyping Lab from Betabox on Vimeo.

Millar is speaking outside a Betabox setup at the N.C. Center for Engineering Technologies in Hickory. Within minutes, about a dozen students from the Discovery High School arrive to start manufacturing their own ideas in the shipping-container-sized classroom.

The box, one of two Betaboxes owned by the Raleigh company, is stuffed with 3D printers, computers, creative materials and a leader who helps students, and even industry, bring their inventions and ideas to life.

It’s the creation of Sean Newman Maroni, an N.C. State University mechanical engineering graduate who started the company three years ago with a $15,000 National Science Foundation grant.

Inside the Betabox in Hickory this morning, Maroni looks over students’ shoulders as they draw their contraptions on whiteboards

“That’s pretty complex,” he tells one group of students from the Newton-Conover City Schools magnet school. “Why not start designing the clock face here.”

Within minutes, a student is drawing the face on an Apple computer with surprising accuracy.

Rapid-prototyping printers are available to make the clock face later in the session.

Heather Williams, chief academic officer for the school district, says business and industry expect graduates to do more than have the correct answer on multiple-choice test questions.

“Businesses are looking for people who create and have ideas,” she says.

So at Discovery High, a magnet school, instruction is project-based. One Discovery student’s method to purify water through simple means was rewarded with a scholarship to Clemson University.

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund contributed the $2,000 needed to bring a Betabox to the parking lot outside the N.C. Center for Engineering Technologies.

A Betabox visited the middle school two years ago and was a hit with students, Williams says.

The idea is to see if students find the visit valuable, and more dates will be scheduled in western North Carolina.

“It’s a test,” says Carol Moore, STEM coordinator at Western Piedmont Council of Governments. If the program encourages student science, technology, engineering and math, more donations can be found, she says.

The Raleigh-based business now has five employees and two Betaboxes that travel the Southeast. The first classroom is actually a converted shipping container. The second was custom-made.

Sometimes a Betabox visits industry, Maroni says. During a trip the Philadelphia, the subject was Merck & Co. Inc.’s oversized blister pack for a hepatitis C drug.

“Everybody hated them,” Maroni says, speaking of the large package originally designed to hold the drug.

Betabox designers helped to create a dial-type radial dispensing package similar to a birth control pill container.

Merck (NYSE: MRK) liked the idea, Maroni says.

Ken Elkins covers manufacturing, international business and economic development for the Charlotte Business Journal.

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