Friday, March 15th the College of Southern Idaho (CSI) hosted their annual Welding Wars event for 130 high school welding students. This is the 7th year for CSI to host the event and it brought top talent from 24 high schools across Idaho and Utah together to celebrate the skilled trades.
Welding Wars has an individual welding competition, a team fabrication competition, and an instructor competition. Contestants were given a unique project design and four hours to build it. Judging was done by Project MFG industry welding experts Shanen Aranmor and Paul McMillan. Through generous sponsor donations, over $35,000 worth of prizes were given to the winners and competitors.
The Individual winners were as follows:
1st Place Individual
Anna Coulumbe from Skyview ICAT
2nd Place Individual
Cooper Warren from Skyview ICAT
3rd Place Individual
Ashten Selacek from Skyview ICAT
The Fabrication Team winners were as follows:
1st Place Fabrication
Team from Green Canyon
2nd Place Fabrication
Team from Rigby High School
3rd Place Fabrication
Team from Tech Careers High School
The Instructor Competition winners were as follows:
1st Place Instructor
Tristan Telford
from Tech Careers High School
2nd Place INSTRUCTOR
Ivak Cooper
from Caldwell High School
3rd Place INSTRUCTOR
Alan Lloyd
from Cassia Regional Tech Center
Career Discovery Event
The competition also had a career discovery event that gave students the opportunity to engage with 20 industry vendors and manufacturing companies for networking and to explore area job opportunities. Students were asked to arrive with a copy of their resume and be prepared to participate in mock-interviews to give them more experience looking for a job.
Instructor Forum
While the students were competing, their welding instructors were invited to attend an Instructor Forum led by Ryan Eubank from Project MFG.
Ryan spent 3 hours giving practical advice on teaching the trades and how to create more engagement in the classroom environment and the benefits of project based learning.
28 Instructors attended this event.
