High school students from around Ohio are in Lima, testing their troubleshooting skills and competing for scholarships.
Patrick Schmitmeyer and Brady Garber from Greenville High School are trying to diagnose what is wrong with a small tractor.
They were among 15 high school teams competing in the State of Ohio Agricultural Power Diagnostics CDE contest at the University of Northwestern Ohio.
“I think it teaches kids how to do simple maintenance on tractors. Look for simple problems. It teaches them to do it under pressure and in a timely manner, “ said Schmitmeyer.
“It’s just fun to come up here and do what you can do. Coming to state, it’s pretty surprising. We never here at State before. You just get a lot out of the competition and how to go through safety procedures and how to meet people and the importance of maintenance,” said Garber.
The top ten teams are competing for more than $75,000 in scholarships.
“They are all competing against each other. They’re competing for the top ten. There’s different types of equipment behind these curtains that they’re working on, whether it be tractors, skid loaders and they have been bugged so they have certain issues they have to be fixed and their job is to fix them with less penalties, which is not doing something correctly in diagnosing. They’re trying to get them to use their mind to actually repair them,” said Don Lowden, Director of Admissions to the College of Applied Technologies at UNOH.
So what does this competition mean to the participants?
“It’s something to teach students inside the classroom to work on an engine or work on a fuel system, electrical system how to put it together, but when you actually have a component in front of you that’s not working correctly, they have to use their troubleshooting skills and that’s what this is definitely designed for. This is where you see the best of the best. These are the students from across the State of Ohio working on this equipment that have already shown that now they’re here at the higher echelon to show what they actually have,” added Lowden.
Here's how the teams finished.
1 OH Harrison CC
2 OH Upper Valley JVS
3 OH Wilmington
4 OH Liberty Center
5 OH Black River
6 OH Versailles
7 OH Liberty Union
8 OH Marysville
9 OH Greene County CC
10 OH Buckeye Hills Ag Mech
