What We Offer
Industry partnership.
Companies bring ITKAN work they actually need done: parts that ship, and problems they have not solved yet. Two partnerships are running now, and there is room for more.
A robotics season ends with a trophy or it does not. Either way the game manual is thrown out in the spring and a new one replaces it. Industry work is the opposite. The problem was there before the students arrived, and somebody still has to live with the answer.
These are not tours or shadowing days. In both partnerships students carry work a company depends on, to a standard the company sets.
A real problem, and the honesty to hand over one that is genuinely unsolved rather than one with a known answer. Somebody technical who can set the bar, write down what counts as meeting it, and turn up to see it tested. A willingness to tell a team its design does not work yet, which is the part most organisations find hardest and the part students learn the most from.
What a company does not need to bring is a curriculum, a lesson plan, or time spent explaining engineering from first principles. These students compete year round. They arrive knowing how to build.
Teams, coaches, the Innovation Hub in Plano, and a cadence. Work gets reviewed on a fixed rhythm against the company's own criteria, not at the end when it is too late to change anything.
ITKAN also stays out of the way where it should. When a partner sets the criteria and scores the work, ITKAN does not sit on that panel, because ITKAN is coaching the teams being scored.
Bring us a problem.
If your company has something real that has not been solved, ITKAN can put student engineering teams on it. Tell us what the problem is and what a good answer would have to do, and we will tell you honestly whether it is a fit.
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CAD · manufacturing · internships
Students design and strength-test parts a FIRST vendor actually ships, and the CAD library they build goes out free to the whole community.
Industry brief · Live validations
A compounding pharmacy handed a real automation problem to high school teams instead of a contractor. Three of the five teams were ITKAN's.