Kids treated to mobile tech lab visit at Monessen Family Center
The mobile lab visited the Monessen Family Center from June 26 to July 3.
By the MVI
This summer, a 24-by-8-foot trailer, fully converted into a mobile technology lab, rolled into Monessen to bring hands-on robotics, coding, and AI training directly into a Mon Valley community that doesn’t have a makerspace of its own.
The lab is the result of a collaboration between Verticals Makerspace & Entrepreneurship Center, a for-profit hub based in Brownsville, and nonprofit Team Humanity.
The mobile lab visited the Monessen Family Center from June 26 to July 3.
The trailer’s conversion was partially funded by EQT, Somerset Trust Bank, and Shelfmark.
“Our hope is to get these programs to kids early, throughout the Mon Valley, to open their eyes to what’s out here and what’s to come so they can use technology to build, not just consume it,” according to the founder of Verticals.
According to organizers, the instinct behind the program is a simple one: kids who don’t see robotics, coding, or AI up close before they’re teenagers often rule themselves out of those fields before anyone’s had the chance to show them otherwise.
“By the time a formal career- readiness program reaches a student in high school, that decision has frequently already been made,” according to a press release.
“Few regions have less excuse for that gap than this one. Carnegie Mellon University, home to one of the world’s leading robotics institutes and the anchor of what’s of-ten called the robotics capital of the world, sits less than 30 miles from Monessen. Mon Valley kids are closer to that ecosystem than almost any other community in the country and have historically had some of the least access to it.”
The Verticals Mobile STEM lab had already made one appearance before Monessen, debuting as a machine shop supporting teams in the pits at a FIRST Robotics regional competition this past spring.
The mobile lab traveled to the Monessen Family Center thanks to a partnership with MPACT U Afterschool Academy and Private Industry Council. Twenty students from the Monessen community showed up across two separate weeks, split into two three-day sessions.
In the first session, the trailer was transformed into an immersive world in which students stepped in and were “transported through time” inside, before programming real wearable devices and using AI prompting to help debug and refine their own code. In the second session, they moved into building app prototypes from scratch, using MIT’s App Inventor platform to turn an idea into working software.
Verticals is expanding the mobile lab’s capabilities into manufacturing and skilled trades as well, with CNC machining, welding, and metal fabrication equipment rolling out next month, alongside plans to bring the lab to more Mon Valley communities beyond Monessen.
“What we’re really talking about is transformation,” Verticals organizers said. “The transformation of a trailer. The transformation of our students, from consuming technology to building with it. And hopefully, the transformation of our region from coal to code.”
