By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
The Great Bend Reads Initiative, GB Reads for short, is scheduled to launch on Jan. 8, 2024. This year's book, "The Wild Robot," by Peter Brown, is the story of an industrial robot who finds itself stranded in the wildness. One highlight of GB Reads next year will be a scavenger hunt where families and students can find robots in the local wilderness. USD 428 Director of Public Information Andrea Bauer reached out to teachers at Great Bend High School for help. Travis Straub's woodworking class cut some pieces, and Jake Hofflinger said his manufacturing class helped assemble the robots.
"The project she was wanting to do involved robots, and they had some two-dimensional cardboard flat robot pictures," he said. "She was thinking, could you guys make something three-dimensional that's cooler than this? It didn't really take much for us to do it."
Hofflinger said more than a dozen of his students worked on the project in their spare time, and Straub's woodworking class also helped. They were able to clean some drawers of spare wood pieces, plastic bits, and nuts and bolts. It was a fun way to apply some of the skills learned in class.
"Most of the stuff we do is technical," Hofflinger said. "It has to be done a certain way. Our laser engraver is accurate to 0.003 of an inch. Most of the stuff we do is parts that have to fit together perfectly or match. This was easy for them, but it was no pressure, creative."
The manufacturing class is mostly juniors at seniors at GBHS. Senior Corbyn Causey had the all-important job of engraving the robot faces. "I tried to make happy-looking robots for the kids," he said. "I hope they make the kids smile."
The class made 15 robots for the scavenger hunt. USD 428 will hand out more than 1,300 copies of "The Wild Robot" for the GB Reads initiative.