This past Thursday, the De Soto High School Emerging Technologies class took a field trip to Gear for Sports.

Emerging Technologies is a new class offered at DHS that teaches students about 3D printing, T-shirt design and screenprinting and is taught by art teacher Tim Mispagel.

There, the class toured the facility and learned about how T-shirts are made as well as how to market them to a specific audience.

“We got a tour of Gear for Sports and we got to see the ground in which they used to make the T-shirts and manufacture all the clothing for Under Armour and Champion and all those big name brands,” junior Caroline Whipple said. “They taught us a lot about the whole printing process of T-shirts and manufacturing things as well as some really good business tips and aspects of selling and getting a good group of people to want to buy your product.”

Along with printing for Under Armour and Champion, Gear for Sports has its own line of clothing that it sells.

“They have their own line of clothing [and explained] how the artist work on developing that artwork, and then seeing the production art,” Mispagel said.

Also while on the trip, the class learned about what to major in if they wanted to continue printing t-shirts after high school.

“The kids got to learn about the types of majors they would major in [to print T-shirts professionally]. Fashion merchandising was one of the popular majors they were looking at, They spoke about how [they have] college students coming from all over the country since they are so big,” Mispagel said.

After the field trip, the class went to José Pepper and had a working lunch to discuss what they learned.

“We talked about how we are going to apply what we learned to our curriculum.” Mispagel said.

“One thing I learned from the field trip is that we are definitely going to do [the field trip] annually for this class,” Mispagel said