Students from Forbes Road Career & Technology School have the skills to join the Future Business Leaders of America, the world’s largest career and technical student organization and one that helps them develop leadership skills.

Those skills were on full display from April 11 to 13, when three Forbes Road students brought home a state championship in 3D animation from the FBLA’s annual leadership conference in Hershey.

“They’ve now qualified for the national competition, which will take place in Chicago in late June and early July,” said George Karnbauer, a computer networking and security instructor and the FBLA adviser at Forbes Road.

The student team of Tia Moran of Gateway, Conner Whyel of Highlands and Austin Gutshall of the Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf had to create a 3D animated video promoting a class at their school. They chose Karnbauer’s computer network security class.

“I really liked working as a team,” said Moran, 18, of Monroeville. “I usually work individually, so it was definitely a change to work with other people, and it’s nice because you learn so many things from the other person.”

The team leaned on Whyel, who had been using the animation software Blender before he began attending classes at Forbes Road.

“I was into it before coming here, and I’ve gotten really good at it,” he said.

Karnbauer said the team had to create a roughly 2-minute video and submit a documentary about the process of creating it.

“They decided to base the foundation of the video on 1950s commercials, where someone has a problem, it gets solved and their desire to learn how is the story of the video,” he said.

Gutshall said the hard work the team put into winning made him proud.

“After spending so much time on the details, seeing it come together and having a finished product we could be proud of was really great,” he said.

Moran said having Gutshall — and consequently an interpreter — on the team brought in an additional learning component.

“We had to learn to communicate effectively with Austin,” he said.

“That was a big component of this: students learning how to work together when they’re used to doing projects on their own.”

When the team arrived back in Monroeville, school officials organized an impromptu parade to welcome them home with emergency and fire vehicles.

Moran said the experience has taught her a lot, above and beyond its technical aspects.

“It makes you grow as a person, and I’ve formed some friendships through this team that I wouldn’t have had otherwise,” she said.

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