At North Fort Myers High, Students Now Design It in 3D, Test It on Screen — Then Build It
The school's new Modeling and Simulation Academy runs a four-year path from TinkerCad to an Autodesk Inventor capstone, with industry certifications along the way and a working robot at the end of the line.
North Fort Myers High School's newest academy starts from a simple pitch: modeling and simulation is where ideas become things you can hold. Students in the program design in 3D, test their work digitally, and then build it — whether that is a part, a mechanism or a working robot — learning industry-standard software, Autodesk Fusion 360 and Inventor, along the way, according to the school's program page.
The academy runs as a four-year progression. Ninth graders start with foundations — device configuration and management and TinkerCad — before moving to advanced modeling and Fusion 360 in tenth grade, mechatronics and integrated projects in eleventh, and an Inventor certification capstone in twelfth. Students can earn Autodesk Fusion 360, Autodesk Inventor and ITS professional certifications that count beyond high school, and no experience is needed to start: students with Level 3 to 5 state assessment scores are eligible, and the district's recent feature on the program notes that Mr. Romano's class is equipped with the technology to bring students' ideas to life.
The academy was created with the School District of Lee County's $1.69 million state Workforce Development Capitalization Incentive grant, the same funding that added an aviation maintenance academy at Bonita Springs High and an applied cybersecurity academy at Fort Myers High. The district says the North Fort Myers program prepares students for postsecondary education and careers in the manufacturing, information technology, and engineering and technology education clusters — a hands-on STEM pipeline built inside a Lee County public high school.
