Students in Missouri Southern's CAPS program building a plane

(From KGCS)

The Missouri Southern Center for Advanced Professional Studies or MOSO CAPS program is designed to give high school students real world immersive job opportunities to help guide their pathway to higher education. It’s teaming up with the Freedom of Flight Museum at the Joplin General Aviation Airport to grant a small group of students a unique hands-on learning experience – building an airplane! That partnership and effort are the focus of the next Newsmakers program.

Four students became the management and construction team for the project: developing work schedules, discovering about part ordering and manufacturing and the challenges that come when working without a manual for a BD-17 Nugget plane. 

Darryl Coit and Tom Christensen with the Freedom of Flight Museum mentored the students on the precision required for the build that offered multiple lessons in engineering. Suzanne Hull and Debra Schow-Kwolek explain the overall benefits of the MOSO CAPS program which helps students narrow their college and career pathway through profession-based learning.

Newsmakers is airing nightly at 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. beginning on KGCS-TV June 7 and will air at 5:30 a.m. Saturday, June 13 on KOAM-TV. It is also posted on the station’s YouTube channel: KGCS – Missouri Southern State University.

KGCS-TV programming can be seen on channel 21 and is also available on regional cable television systems such as Sparklight, Mediacom and Optimum Internet. The station operates as a service of the Department of Communication at Missouri Southern State University.