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The goal of this program, funded by the National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education (NSF ATE) program, is to provide additional professional and technical skills to cohorts of high school students through a five-week Saturday Program. The curriculum is continuously reviewed and modified to address current skills needed by the technician workforce. While this program was originally proposed and planned as in-person, the leadership team decided to shift to a virtual environment as the pandemic caused the closure of community college campuses where the program was to be held. Program modalities and curriculum were modified to shift to an online experience. In Fall 2022, the program was able to return to an in-person format. The program’s leadership team disseminates best practices through presentations, social media, publications, and workshops at national conferences. The four-day Summer Teachers’ Workshop brings high school and community college educators from throughout the United States to experience the same program that is used for the high school students. The Program’s outreach efforts and the national dissemination of best practices for engaging underrepresented populations in technology careers has a national impact that will potentially increase the diversity of the technician workforce. The program has inspired participants to have confidence in their own abilities. Principals from participating high schools have commented that students who attended the Program have demonstrated an improvement in their academics and behavior due to the knowledge of professional and technical skills that they have gleaned from the program. The program has provided inner-city students from four high schools with out-of-school, hands-on educational programs focusing on professional skills, technical writing and engineering technology competencies. Participant demographics will be discussed in this paper as diversity is a key objective of the program. The program utilizes industry-driven, project-based learning (PBL) and lessons in career and college readiness to prepare students for the workforce. Each student session consists of five consecutive Saturdays and is taught by a team of high school teachers, community college faculty, and instructors with expertise in professional skills, teambuilding, leadership, technical writing, coding, and STEM disciplines.
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Closing the Skills Gap: Construction and Engineering Education Using Mixed Reality – A Case Study
This research work-in-progress paper investigated the application of emerging mixed reality (MR) technology in construction and engineering education. The construction industry is facing a severe shortage of skilled workforce. As the baby boomers are retiring, the younger generation, especially college students, are often criticized for their lack of professional experience and career-specific competency. To close the skills gap and accelerate the transition of college students to competent workforce, this paper proposed a new genre of learning and professional training using MR. The main promise of the MR technology resides in its ability to augment virtual contents on top of the physical reality to facilitate tacit knowledge learning, and simulate learning activities that traditionally can only be obtained from actual professional experience. An undergraduate wood framing lab was designed as a case study to explore how students might perform in this new learning and training environment. Specifically, the case study investigated if MR would facilitate student design comprehension and transfer such understanding into the knowledge and skills needed to build the wood structure. A randomly selected student control group was given traditional paper-based construction drawings to perform the same tasks with other student groups with various visualization technology assistance. Project performance and behavior of student groups were compared to determine if there was a significant difference between the control group and the experiment groups. A pair of pre- and post-survey on MR-intervened learning experience was also conducted to explore student perceptions towards this new genre of learning and training. The research design proposed in this work-in-progress study and its preliminary results could be a good reference and foundation to future research in this arena.
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- PAR ID:
- 10110295
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 5
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2018.8658992
