Suffolk Construction hosted young Charlestown students at its Boston Smart Lab as part of the “Future of Construction” program on Dec. 13.
Suffolk teamed with Autodesk, MassRobotics and Boston Public Schools on this initiative to provide middle school students an opportunity to explore the future of building and showcase potential career pathways that include a variety of technologies. A class of fifth-grade STEM students from the Harvard-Kent School were selected to participate in the pilot program, structured around three main areas of focus: Design, Build and Apply.
The students recently visited Suffolk’s headquarters in Roxbury, where they were given the opportunity to see how innovative technology is being “Applied” and construction is being transformed. Students participated in an interactive and immersive tour of Suffolk’s Smart Lab with Smart Lab Director Kelsey Gauger, where they got to see their design projects come to life on the Datawall, experience their own structures in Virtual Reality, and see the endless possibilities for visualizing design inside the CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment). Following the tour, students attended a career panel with current Suffolk employees, where they were given the chance to ask questions and receive feedback on their projects
The goal of the Future of Construction program is to provide students with an integrated STEM learning experience while also exposing them to construction, design and engineering and robotics professionals. The students had spent time at Autodesk and MassRobotics creating/developing their projects and got the opportunity to present these at Suffolk.
The initiative is a byproduct of Boston Public Schools’ “Excellence for All” program, which has been working to bridge opportunity gaps for children in the City of Boston.