Thousands of students toured Alcoa's Davenport Works today, but not in person. The Alcoa Foundation partnered with Discovery Education to host a virtual field trip called "Manufacture Your Future."
As part of National Manufacturing Day, over 140,000 students from 4,000 schools across the country participated in the live, 45-minute webcast.
Rob Woodall, the plant's manufacturing director, wanted to show the new face of manufacturing by offering an inside look at how auto and aeronautical parts are made.
"What we've tried to do by opening our doors is, you see it's a clean place. It's not a dirty, grimy, grungy, oily place at all, but that might be the mindset. A plant like this is 67 years old, so maybe their parents and grandparents remember World War II factories might have been oily and awful. That's not what it's like anymore."
A production crew set up cameras throughout the plant, employees talked about their jobs. And the student viewers were allowed to ask questions.
Helena Poda, from Discovery Education, says virtual field trips are part of a growing national trend.
"Due to budget cuts and other reasons for districts, there's often not an opportunity to go on actual field trips, so we've been trying to open doors for students in classrooms in a number of different ways to give them that special experience that they might not have otherwise."
During the virtual tour, students learned about the 80 different recipes for aluminum used by the Quad Cities Alcoa plant to make over 10,000 products for its customers.
