IA’s Efforts To Shape The Future Of Industrial Automation

The future — whether of an individual, company, or entire industry — depends on what we do right now. So if we want the future of industrial automation to be successful, we must prepare for that by fostering a pipeline of skilled engineers to enter the workforce.

That’s why we put so much effort into Inductive Automation’s Educational Engagement Program. By providing free Ignition licenses to qualifying educational institutions, free Ignition Core Certification tests for students, and more, this program helps give future engineers what they’ll need in the field of industrial controls.

As an organization that offers the leading platform on the market for SCADA, HMI, MES, IIoT, and more, it’s our responsibility to help students get hands-on experience and technical knowledge in Ignition, because we know it will be a must-have on their resumes when they go to apply for jobs later on.

To illustrate how we’re accomplishing our educational mission, I’d like to share a few highlights of some recent initiatives.

The Inaugural Student Build-a-Thon

Our annual Ignition Build-a-Thon is known as the ultimate industrial automation competition. This year, we created the Student Build-a-Thon to give young engineers that same opportunity, providing dozens of students with hands-on experience in industrial controls.

From April 25–28, eight student teams were given 72 hours to build an interface for an automated fast food restaurant. Their project had to include at least five Perspective pages: order interface, inventory management, alarming, trending, and navigation. These requirements covered a core set of technical skills for engineers, and gave the participants the chance to show the world what they could do.

Towards the end of the competition, we threw the students a curveball, and they had to think fast to incorporate a surprise spec into their project. The twist was to sum the total revenue (across all processed orders) to the Inventory Management page, ensuring the inventory value could be reset on the page. For those who have some experience creating industrial control solutions, I’m sure you’ll agree that the ability to quickly pivot during a project is a valuable skill to hone!

Our judging panel carefully reviewed the students’ projects, and we’re excited to announce that the Clovis Crush team from Clovis Community College is the winner of the 2025 Student Build-a-Thon. Congratulations to team members Benjamin Shigeto Hallaway, Gurkaran Singh Sandhu, and Robert Voss, as well as the team’s faculty sponsor Matthew Graff, on your victory! An additional congratulations to the runner-up in the competition, the Ignite team from the University of Kentucky, which consisted of a single competitor — Daniel Rodriguez — and faculty sponsor Jens Hannemann.

Thanks to their engineering innovations, the winning team and the runner-up earned tickets and lodging for the 2025 Ignition Community Conference (ICC), which means they’ll get to see the thrilling finale of the 2025 Build-a-Thon in person. ICC will be held from September 16–18 in our new larger venue in downtown Sacramento, and the Clovis Community College team’s project will be featured at the event.

Based on all the impressive projects this competition yielded, we have to say that at this moment, industrial automation’s future is looking bright, and we hope this Student Build-a-Thon will be the first of many more! If you want to test your Ignition skills, check out the Student Build-a-Thon challenge on the Ignition Exchange.

The Industry 4.0 Project

Clovis Community College certainly set its team up for success in the Student Build-a-Thon by adding Ignition into the curriculum of its Automation, Robotics & Mechatronics program via the Industry 4.0 Project. This project gives students the tools they need to grow their control systems skills, and when it comes to an automation engineering education, this kind of hands-on and applicable experience is incredibly valuable. So when the program instructor reached out to us, we were thrilled to offer them free Ignition licenses.

In the Industry 4.0 program, students build an Ignition Unified Namespace (UNS) solution with Cirrus Link’s MQTT Transmission and Engine Modules to control a miniature smart home. Seeing the physical effect of their programming knowledge gives students a better technical foundation to build upon, and helps inspire them to pursue a career in the industry. So as they program a door to open in their miniature smart home, they just might be opening a door to a successful future in automation technology as well.

To learn more about the Industry 4.0 project, read our Clovis Community College case study.

Folsom Lake College Hackathon

We also sponsored the 2025 Tech Summit & Hackathon at Folsom Lake College on April 18. At the event, we held a technical presentation and challenged high school and college students to build a mock interface for the fermentation process in a kombucha production line. The challenge was meant to mimic what will soon be taking place in Folsom Lake College’s new science building, Oak Hall: as of next semester, the college will be using Ignition to educate students in its chemistry program.

Since the students participating in the Hackathon were working with an industrial automation platform and building out an HMI for the very first time, the air was filled with excitement (and just a little nervousness). Ultimately the students had great fun with the challenge, with one project even featuring cartoon cats on every page!

IA judges were impressed with how much the students accomplished in such little time and without previous Ignition experience, and the event helped more students get to know what it’s like to work with an industrial automation platform. We hope some of them will be inspired to go down one of the engineering career pathways as a result.

If you’re interested in trying out the Folsom Lake College Hackathon kombucha project for yourself, you can download the resource for free on the Ignition Exchange.

Help Us Empower More Students

If you want to bring the power of Ignition to your campus too, I invite you to apply to the Educational Engagement Program. Together, we can help provide the students of today with the tools and knowledge they need to become the incredible engineers of tomorrow. And by doing so, we’ll make the future of industrial automation something we can all look forward to.