When a Dodgeball Launcher Became Our Blueprint: Inside Dyersburg City’s Advanced Manufacturing Pathway

This past spring, a group of students stood in front of a room and explained why they’d spent months designing a dodgeball launcher.

Not for fun — for a classmate in their PE class who couldn’t throw far enough to play. The project started as a middle school design challenge: build something useful, solve a real problem. Somewhere along the way, an employer partner got involved. Then it got serious enough that a UT Martin engineering professor joined in to help refine the design. Now the students’ teachers are presenting it at the Tennessee STEM Innovation Summit, and one of our newest university partnerships exists because of it.

That’s not the story I would have told you two years ago. And that’s the point.

The vision was never just credentials

When we started building out our Engineering and Machining/Welding pathway, I wanted every student to leave with a credential, real work-based learning on their resume, and relationships with local industry that meant something. That’s still true. But I’ve learned the credential can’t be the finish line — the work has to start much earlier than senior year.

We’re now layering in mini-courses taught by industry professionals well before students ever touch a capstone project, building toward what we call an EDC: an employer-designed challenge. By senior year, I want the work to be student-led — students reaching out to industry contacts themselves, securing a mentor, finding a sponsor for their capstone project, with their teacher stepping back into a facilitator role instead of running the show. We’re even exploring giving students an actual project budget to manage. If we can pull that off, senior year stops being the end of a program and starts being the beginning of a career.

The hook isn’t the lab. It’s the person standing in it.

Ask me what gets a student excited to walk into the Ermco/Rough Country lab, and I won’t point to the equipment first. I’ll point to the teacher.

We’re fortunate to have strong facilities, but I’ve also watched a teacher relationship undo an otherwise great experience. It’s relational before it’s technical.

That relationship starts earlier than high school. By the end of eighth grade, every incoming freshman sits down one-on-one with a counselor and their parents. Our career exploration teacher walks students through that transition almost like a second parent — and because the ninth-grade career exploration teacher is her husband, students get genuine continuity of care built right into the sequencing.

One of our staff members has a daughter who’s already deep into Future Farmers of America (FFA) and gravitating toward the marketing side of it. Her daughter’s friends don’t do FFA, and for a while that almost mattered more than the opportunity itself. We’ve worked hard to shift that mindset: this isn’t about what your friends are doing. This is about your future. Watching a student make that shift — from choosing a pathway based on who else is in the room to choosing it based on where they want to go — is the hook for us as educators, just as much as it is for the students.

The secret sauce is adaptability

The most successful thing we’ve tried in the last two years has been adding employer-designed challenges before senior year, not just during it. The secret sauce was accountability from someone other than their teacher, real-world stakes, and students genuinely feeling like part of a team solving something that mattered. I’ve had a student tell me, unprompted, “I’m doing this project for Nucor” — not for a grade. That shift in ownership is everything.

None of it works without employer partners willing to be flexible: showing up for students who can’t leave campus for traditional work-based learning, meeting kids where they are instead of requiring them to fit an existing mold.

Not every idea lands, and that’s fine

We learned that the hard way with a senior hiring event we used to hold on the very last day of senior year. On paper, it made sense — bring employers in right before graduation. In practice, senioritis had already set in, and the timing worked against us. So we shifted it. Instead of a single event at the finish line, employer engagement is now something students experience continuously throughout the year — a culture we build, not a moment we stage.

The ripple effect back home

Maybe the clearest sign of change is what’s happening with parents. It used to be “why is my kid doing this?” Now it’s “how do I get my kid into this?” That shift didn’t happen by accident. We’ve leaned into social media and local press to get students excited enough that they bring the buzz home themselves, and we’ve made a point of getting different groups of parents physically into our buildings to see it firsthand. In a small town, word of mouth is still the most powerful marketing we have.

Our student ambassador program has helped too. Underclassmen and seniors give tours to visitors, which builds communication and soft skills while they’re still young enough for it to stick. We’re pushing that even earlier now — our incoming freshmen are already getting up to give presentations, working on eye contact and a firm handshake. Whether a student ends up in a machine shop or a completely different career, those are skills that travel with them.

What I’d tell a neighboring district

When a student hits a wall — a failed certification exam, a stumble in a dual credit course — the answer we’ve landed on is simple: focus on growth, not the setback. Help the student build a plan to come back and retake it. That’s it. It’s not complicated, but it requires patience and follow-through every single time.

We’re not finished. But if you’d told me two years ago that a middle schooler’s dodgeball launcher would end up in front of a room at a statewide STEM summit, backed by a local employer and a university engineering professor, I wouldn’t have believed you. Now it’s just Tuesday in Dyersburg.