2019 DAY 1: Camp Intro, Safety, and Design

All of the staff at RangerACE were incredibly excited to welcome campers to their first day at camp and introduce them to this year’s project. Each group of campers across the two weeks would be building half of a basketball court for Voigt Elementary, a local school in Round Rock. Allowing campers to experience each and every facet of construction hands-on is a key pillar of RangerACE, and through this process campers would be able to do a great deal of good for their community by giving kids a court that will be around for years.

Part of RangerACE Pro Bill Blasé’s safety presentation. This form must be filled out prior to any digging in order to ensure that said digging is safe (and legal).

To start the day, our group of 20 campers played a quick icebreaker to wake up and get to know their new friends and teammates a bit better. After this, instructors gave campers an overview of the week, gave each camper their own RangerACE PPE (personal protective equipment), and went through a Code of Conduct that each camper read and signed.

Around 10, RangerACE Pro Bill Blasé, head of safety at Ranger Excavating, arrived to discuss safety with campers and stress the importance in being safe throughout the week while on the jobsite. In order to best keep every camper safe, Blasé and instructors worked with the campers to help them create their own “Safety Contract”, giving campers the chance to think through all of the possible safety risks that could pop up during the week.

Blasé followed this up with some anecdotes about safety from his many years of experience; he discussed everything from the worst safety violation he’s seen to how he’s dealt with OSHA and MSHA (Occupational/Mining Safety and Health Administration). After a short safety quiz, campers went outside to see a quick demo on what can happen to a person (or watermelon in this case) who is not wearing their PPE on the jobsite.

Before the campers broke for lunch, they met with their table groups to create their very own “construction company”. Important for making the week a personalized and engaging experience, campers were able to pick their company’s name and make a logo. These companies would compete against each other throughout the week as well as create their own presentation board throughout the week displaying what they’ve done.

RangerACE Pro Conan Witzel teaching campers the tools to create their own jobsite plans.

After lunch, campers began learning about topography and its importance in construction. Understanding jobsite plans hinges around understanding what the topographic lines on them mean, and to figure this out instructors had an activity for campers to create their own topographic map. Each table had a deconstructable 3D-printed mountain which they broke apart and traced layer by layer to translate the 3D mountain to their 2D paper.

Equipped with this knowledge, campers spent the next hour working on matching jobsite plans in various mediums, giving them a feel for all of the different ways jobsite plans are viewed and used.

Now that they were familiar with jobsite plans, it was time for them to create their very own for the basketball court. To begin this process, RangerACE Pro Holden Murphy aided campers in flying his specialized drones around the site to get aerial shots of the jobsite.

Next, RangerACE Pros Conan Witzel and Steve Ihnen, Civil Engineers at Garrett-Ihnen, worked with campers to construct a working model of the jobsite on CAD, a widely-used modeling software.

Deconstructable 3D-printed models of mountains used by campers to create hand-made topographic maps.