Press release submitted on behalf of Wittmann USA.
Core Technology’s 4-year-old STEM initiative gives hundreds of students manufacturing experience year-round
Wittmann USA has donated equipment to North Carolina’s 4-year-old Molding Kids for Success program, a highly popular STEM initiative developed by injection molder Core Technology.
Core, based in Greensboro, took delivery of a Wittmann WP80 sprue picker and a W818 three-axis robot to fuel the imaginations and aspirations of students K through 12 who flock to the program through the year.
In its fourth year, Molding Kids For Success is a non-profit organization that educates area youth in science, technology, engineering and math by combining classroom experiments with real-world applications on the manufacturing floor. Students conduct multiple experiments learning about plastics, thermosets, polymers and more.
Students from schools throughout North and South Carolina apply to attend the no-cost program, which was launched with local grants and is supported through fundraisers including an annual golf tournament.
Weeklong camps for 15 students at a time are held throughout the year for ages 11-14, while students K to 12 can take a two-hour facility tour. More than 1,500 children a year participate in Core’s summer camps. The program is gaining regional buzz, with South Carolina State and Southern University of Louisiana inquiring about how it works.
Upon completing their session, students receive a trophy and a T-shirt. But the lessons they learn about career opportunities are the real prize.
“We are really impacting the community by providing hands on project-based learning activities,” said Core’s CEO Geoff Foster. “We are seeing tremendous interest and growth. A crowd favorite is robotics and hands-on experiences with our three-axis robots.”
When Core moves from its current 36,000-square-foot facility to a new 100,000-square-foot location in 2026, also in Greensboro, it will feature a lab dedicated to the program. The lab will house the donated Wittmann equipment.
“We are proudly committed to assisting Core achieve its mission through this vital program,” said Wittmann USA President Sonny Morneault.
How the program works
Molding Kids for Success emerged from community questions about how to address the lack of summer learning opportunities, said Program Director Brandon Frederick, and began recruiting fifth-grade students to get them on the path to manufacturing prowess early.
The initial curriculum was based around the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, “taking what students are learning in middle school and trying to build a bridge between the classroom curriculum and industry applications. A lot of recruiting and industry experts are saying that the kids just aren’t ready to do what we need them to do right out of school. So, our goal was to be able to bridge that gap. We build off the curriculum to make sure that what we’re teaching the students is relevant and that they’re getting real-life examples of what they’re learning in the classroom.
”For instance, students might think they’re never going to use geometry. We’ll take them into our tool shop and show them how we use geometry every day. We use right-handed triangles; angles are big for what we do. So, things of that nature, that’s kind of how we developed the initial curriculum.”
The program also aims to address the fact that two-thirds of Guilford County’s schools are classified as Title 1, meaning students come from low-income/impoverished families.
Foster wrote a whitepaper titled “Molding Kids For Success: A Summer Program in STEM Exploration For Middle School Students” to set forth the program’s initial focus, then Frederick developed the weeklong curriculum that breaks out, hour by hour, what will be accomplished.
That curriculum includes:
- Essential skills
- Introduction to manufacturing
- Digital and data literacy
- Exercises on circuits, digital twins, the shop floor, pumps and robotics
- Introduction to AI
The program’s outlook
The program is exploring opportunities to extend its plastics education to the high school and college level, Frederick continued. Smith High School brings two to three groups of students to Core’s facility each year, and ”they really like what they see. The majority of the students that come through, and even the parents, have no idea what plastic manufacturing is.“
Many students and parents that come back for multiple years, he continued, including a South Carolina family in its third consecutive year. Because the family’s son is aging out of the program, he’s returning to Core as an intern in summer 2026; meanwhile, his 10-year-old sister will return to the program.
The daughter “was doing some stick welding and she was phenomenal,” Frederick said. “She got in, she sat in the seat and the welder said, ’OK, let’s go.‘ She pulled the trigger and never looked back. She produced one of the most beautiful pieces of art that that I’ve seen.“
The program has evolved quickly in its four years, Frederick added. For instance, with local schools requiring a computer science course, the program introduces students to Core’s Enterprise Resource Planning system. During Manufacturing Month in October, students learn about states of matter, so Core shows students up close the effects of adding additives to plastics.
Ultimately, the program gets students so excited they end up passing along what they’ve learned.
“We host an open house before each of the camps, and that’s really the parents‘ opportunity to see what it is that they do,” Frederick concluded. “That has become a recruiting tool; parents want to put in applications. We have some parents who are industry experts, and they want to come in and talk to the kids. And what we found that’s been pretty cool is the parents are asking their kids, ‘What did you do today? Can you teach me about that?’ At the end of the camp, the students can go home and teach their parents, grandparents and friends about this.”
To learn more about Core Technology’s Molding Kids For Success program, visit www.coretechnologycorp.com/molding-kids or email
moldingkidsforsuccess@coretechnologycorp.com.
About WITTMANN
With headquarters in Vienna, Austria, WITTMANN is a global company with 7 production facilities, 31 subsidiaries, and 24 agencies in 52 countries. WITTMANN is the only manufacturer offering plastic processors worldwide a complete range of innovative robot automation and injection molding machine technology, along with auxiliary equipment for material conveying, blending, drying, granulating, heating and cooling, for individual work cells to fully integrated project managed system solutions from one manufacturer. Their worldwide sales and service network provides unmatched local service and support.