Submitted Photo Back row, from left to right, Seth Huus, Scott Tollefson, Will Greenlee, Freeman Sanderson, Skylar Tollefson, Spencer Elliot, and Lucy Juarez; front row, from left to right, Taren Davis, Geoffrey Bagley, and Elaina Carlson pose with a fort/playhouse they built earlier this month in a summer building trades skills class.

Fourteen high school students in a summer building trades skills class spent a week building a playhouse/fort for preschoolers earlier this month.

Matt Ruhland, who taught the class for the Minot Public Schools, said the 14 students learned valuable skills including planning, design, working together, and working on different parts of a project that will eventually have to fit together to form a harmonious whole.

The play house/fort will be donated to the Early Childhood Learning Lab program being built at the Minot Area Workforce Academy next to the new high school.

All of the sophomores through seniors told him on the first day of class that they are interested in working in the building trades as adults.

“There’s a huge shortage in the trades right now,” said Ruhland, since many people are interested in becoming engineers.

But Ruhland said the building and construction trades are well-paying, steady jobs, backed by unions, and are good careers for students who are interested in the field.

About half of the students had taken other classes in the building trades during the school year, while others were novices.

Working on the design for the playhouse was good practice for jobs they might encounter in the real world, since a client will often say they want a particular kind of project like a new deck and workers will have to come up with a design that works, said Ruhland.

During the week-long class, Ruhland said the students also had a chance to interact with contractors in areas they didn’t have a chance to work on with the playhouse.

The class was funded by a N.D. CTE Summer Camp grant, said Pam Stroklund, director of career and technical education for the Minot Public Schools.