May 11 2018 – North Central College celebrated the opening of a laboratory in the Dr. Myron Wentz Science Center with a ceremonial ribbon cutting on May 8. The Omron Design and Automation Lab will give North Central College engineering students the exciting opportunity to work with technologies currently used in industry while constructing their own working systems at the numerous workstations provided.
Giving students access to today’s technology is a core purpose of the Wentz Science Center, and the laboratory will play a key role to this effect. The lab was built with funding from Omron Foundation, which coordinates the charitable efforts of the Omron companies in the United States. Omron is an provider of automation technology and creative solutions for tackling society’s challenges, and the Foundation supports engineering education as well as STEM initiatives throughout the K-12 education levels.
The Omron Foundation has also granted all North Central College faculty and students unlimited access to its E-learning modules, which are packed full of information on core industry technologies such as vision, robotics, control, motion and safety. They will be an integral part of North Central College’s four-year bachelor of science degrees in computer, electrical and mechanical engineering beginning in the 2018-2019 academic year.
Omron Foundation has also supported North Central College’s Japanese language program with grants that allow students to visit Japan each year and study there for terms of ten weeks or longer. Omron has supported the Japanese Language program since 2008 with the aim of helping students improve Japanese-American cross-cultural understanding.
