Aretha Murphy (left) and Geri Neal work together as engineering technicians; their friendship began in classes at Lawson State Community College.

Aretha Murphy and Geri Neal became friends during the final months of the industrial electronics program at Lawson State Community College in Birmingham, Alabama. This fall they completed their first year as colleagues at Power Grid Engineering, LLC, where they work as full-time electrical engineering technicians.

"These two really stand out," said Nancy Wilson, chair of the Engineering and Manufacturing Technology Division at Lawson State in Birmingham, Alabama. Wilson is a senior team member of the Consortium for Alabama Regional Center for Automotive Manufacturing (CARCAM), the ATE center based at Gadsden State Community College in Gadsden, Alabama.

Lawson State uses CARCAM's curriculum for advanced technology degree programs that incorporate multiple crafts like electrical, electronics, welding, and machine tooling for manufacturers. Students have the option of taking more courses in a particular craft depending on their interests. Lawson State and CARCAM's partner colleges also use the outreach program CARCAM developed to attract, enroll, and graduate diverse populations for manufacturing careers.

2,331 students from 68 middle and high schools toured manufacturing facilities on National Manufacturing Day in Florida thanks to FLATE's leadership of this statewide career recruitment event.

Two ATE centers have found that explanations of modern manufacturing are effective when they include a bit of show-and-tell in the form of facility tours.

Florida Advanced Technological Education Center of Excellence (FLATE) and the 360? Manufacturing and Applied Engineering ATE Regional Center of Excellence use National Manufacturing Day as an opportunity to work with their industry partners on manufacturing facility tours at various locations in Florida and Minnesota, respectively. FLATE is located at Hillsborough Community in Tampa, Florida; 360? is located at Bemidji State University in Bemidji, Minnesota.

FLATE Surveys Document Positive Results of Industry Tours

FLATE coordinated the celebration of National Manufacturing Day in Florida on October 4. As a result of its collaboration with its regional industry partners, 2,331 students from 68 middle and high schools, 71 parents and 110 teachers toured one or more of 72 high-tech manufacturing facilities located in 23 Florida counties.

Altogether 225 employees from 71 manufacturers and colleges, regional manufacturers associations, manufacturing-related professional organizations, and school districts across the state worked together to make the day successful. In addition to arranging the tours, FLATE and its industry partners raised $5,000 for manufacturing day t-shirts. FLATE designed and delivered the t-shirts to manufacturers throughout Florida.

FLATE’s surveys of participants provide evidence of the tours’ impact.

Matt Martella explains his work as a mobile applications programmer in award-winning video on DeafTEC's website.

DeafTEC, Technological Education Center for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students at the Rochester Institute of Technology, received a 2013 Telly Award for its video Deaf Professionals in IT: Mobile App Programmer. It is one of the compelling new videos about STEM technicians with hearing loss on the center's website.

The video was created by Pellet Productions of Reading, Massachusetts. Pellet Productions has produced several other ATE-related videos including ATE Central's ATE Student Success Stories.

The award-winning DeafTEC video features Matt Martella explaining the work he does as a mobile applications programmer at Highmark Inc., a health insurance company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Rassoul Dastmozd, Ann Beheler, and Vince DiNoto offer advice during the MentorLinks meeting.

All community college educators can benefit from the advice that three community college administrators shared recently with MentorLinks mentees.

Vince DiNoto, principal investigator of the ATE GeoTech Center, Ann Beheler, principal investigator of the National Convergence Technology Center, and Rassoul Dastmozd, president of St. Paul College, have served as mentors for several MentorLinks cohorts.

All three have also been involved in small and large National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education (ATE) initiatives and other externally funded projects. During a panel discussion at the meeting of MentorLinks mentees and mentors in October, they talked about the "multiplier effect" of building on the success of small grants, like MentorLinks.

MentorLinks is a program improvement initiative of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC). The association awards funds from its National Science Foundation ATE grant to two-year colleges that want to start or improve STEM technician education programs. Colleges selected for the program receive the services of an experienced community college mentor, $20,000 for faculty release time for planning and professional development, and travel stipends over the two-year grant period.

AACC will issue a new request for proposals from community and technical colleges in February 2014.

Kostian Iftica, Tech Apprentice alumnus, and owner of Brilliant Geeks, a computer services company.

Kostian Iftica's experience as a Tech Apprentice shaped Brilliant Geeks, the technology services company he operates in Boston.

Conversations with New England Baptist Hospital physicians as they adopted electronic healthcare records during his Tech Apprenticeship in the summer of 2007 were among the seeds for the business he started two years later while attending college full time.

Tech Apprentice is a model internship program developed by the Broadening Advanced Technological Education Connects (BATEC), an ATE National Center of Excellence for Computing and Information Technologies at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, in partnership with Boston Public Schools’ Office of Instructional and Information Technology TechBoston unit and Boston Private Industry Council.

Jessica Zabloski, Research Associate at Bioo Scientific Corp., describes making ELISA kits in the Jobs sections of Biotech-Careers.org website.

Biotech-Careers.org gives students details about real work environments, realistic estimates of paychecks, and accurate information about the academic paths to careers in a variety of biotechnology fields.

These three categories are among the among the information gaps Bio-Link purposefully addresses with Biotech-Careers.org (http://biotech-careers.org).

"We realized that there weren't career sites out there that met this need, so we built our own," said Sandra Porter who developed the website with Linnea Fletcher. Both Porter and Fletcher are co-principal investigators of the Bio-Link Next Generation National ATE Center for Biotechnology and Live Sciences based at City College of San Francisco.

Casey Kraus hopes to become a mechanical maintenance journeyman at a commercial nuclear power facility.

Casey Kraus, a third-year apprentice at Florida Power & Light’s St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant, “loves” her work.

“I’ve always wanted to work with my hands, not have a desk job. I wanted to have a job where I could continually learn new things,” Kraus said. The $30 per hour starting wage was “absolutely” part of the appeal of a nuclear technician career, as well.

Kraus’ apprenticeship is part of the curriculum of the Power Plant Technology Institute that Indian River State College (IRSC), Florida Power & Light, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers created together. In 2013, the American Association of Community Colleges recognized this collaboration as one of the Top Five College and Corporate Training Partnerships in the U.S.

"The IRSC and FPL's Power Plant Technology Program greatly prepared me for my career at the St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant. Although there are some things in the field that can never be completely recreated in a classroom, I believe that IRSC and the FPL Subject Matter Experts made the program as close to real life at the plant as possible. Everything I've learned in the program I apply in some way to almost every job I go on each and every day. With the training I have received, I have to ability to take my degree and my INPO [Institute of Nuclear Power Operations] certificate, and work at any nuclear plant in the country. The possibilities are absolutely endless," she said.

Thirteen California community college students between the ages of 19 and 49 spent two weeks in China at the end of the capstone course that was taught simultaneously to them and to Chinese students from SIP Institute of Services Outsourcing in Suzhou, China, using remote and translation technologies.

The Mid-Pacific Information and Communication Technologies (MPICT) Center's three international pilot projects have yielded positive results for students and faculty. While study-abroad programs are common for liberal arts students, MPICT's multiple international experiences are rare for technology students.

Each of MPICT's pilot projects utilized Cisco's Network Academy curriculum because it is an industry standard taught uniformly around the world. For the two most recent experiments, with a school in France in 2011 and a school in China in 2012, MPICT's faculty partners developed a problem-based scenario that gave students roles in a fictitious company that was merging international units with incompatible network systems. The mixed teams of American and international students had to integrate the systems.

"We wanted them to get the experience of doing the project, doing an international project using the tools they were learning, modern tools to collaborate across the ocean. A lot of work in our field is performed this way," said Pierre Thiry, MPICT principal investigator.

The Center for Advanced and Emerging Technologies is on the left and the Construction Education Center is on the right in this preliminary drawing of the facilities where Metropolitan Community College plans to utilize innovative instructional models developed by ATE programs.

Multiple Advanced Technological Education programs are influencing Metropolitan Community College's (MCC) concept for construction of a Center for Advanced and Emerging Technologies (CAET).

Architects created the concept for the CAET after listening to the leaders of the Midwest Center for Information Technology talk about the competency-based curriculum they have piloted with ATE support and the virtual center by the same name that MCIT now operates to teach information technology (IT) as an enabling technology for various industries.

"We're trying to design a space that is going to be more relevant to what the work will look like," said Tom Pensabene, dean of Information Technology and e-Learning at MCC and principal investigator of MCIT. MCIT is a regional ATE center hosted by AIM, a nonprofit organization created more than a decade ago by the Chamber of Commerce to facilitate the development of IT in Omaha and throughout Nebraska.

Pensabene said the new facility will make it possible to scale innovative programs that MCIT currently offers among the 10 colleges in its consortium, and to attempt new, "more radical approaches" to hands-on learning.

Dorothy Najeebah Mateen, a recent Lansing Community College graduate, was one of 60 ATE students and alumni who participated in the 2013 ATE Principal Investigators Conference.

For Dorothy Najeebah Mateen, a capstone project designing sustainable energy systems for a new housing development was a chance to be creative with the technical skills she acquired at Lansing Community College.

Mateen described the solar hot water system she designed with electric and gas backup during the October 24 showcase session at the 2013 Advanced Technological Education Principal Investigators Conference. The showcase sessions at the annual ATE-PI meeting in Washington, D.C., are always lively as the educators who lead ATE initiatives and their students enthusiastically explain the innovative projects they have developed with ATE grants from the National Science Foundation.

At the conference opening plenary, Celeste Carter extended as special welcome to the 60 student presenters and reminded the 800 other conference attendees—educators, employers, federal officials, and nonprofit organization representatives—that students are "the reason the ATE program is around." Carter is the lead program director of ATE in the National Science Foundation's Division of Undergraduate Education.

In 2012 alone, 96,460 students at 2,240 institutions were directly affected by the grants that provide seed money for educators to develop innovative programs. Since 1993, the ATE program has disbursed $890 million to support a wide variety of programs to improve technician education; prepare science, technology, engineer, and math educators; and conduct research on technician education.

For the 20-year anniversary, ATE Central and Pellet Productions teamed up to create a video about the ATE program and its accomplishments. The American Association of Community Colleges will post videos of the conference plenary sessions, slides from the workshops, and photos from the entire conference on the conference website by November 8.