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FLATE’s mission includes providing meaningful career and educational pathways for the advanced manufacturing industry sectors. This includes the entire spectrum from introducing young children to “making” to post baccalaureate STEM degrees, with our sweet spot the middle of the spectrum where we find high school students, post-secondary students in 2-year technical programs and/or technical institutions.   As educators, we know the value of education for both personal and professional growth and always encourage students to consider continuing their education to support that growth.   Obviously, it becomes easier to do this when we have smooth pathways that optimizes both their education and their experiences. To this end, we developed credentialed-based articulations to the A.S. Engineering Technology (A.S.E.T.) to give full credit for a number of credentials thereby accelerating the time completion.   This pathway model has been adopted in many disciplines and at many ...

  The 39th state-wide Forum on Engineering Technology (ET Forum) held on September 21st and 22nd was hosted by the College of Central Florida in Ocala. Despite hurricane Irma, the forum was well attended with 33 participants and 13 FL colleges. The Forum provided ET and related discipline area faculty administrators and educators direct interaction with industry professionals, Florida Dept. of Education program supervisors to address the issues concerning our field of technical education. The Florida Engineering Technology Leadership Council and the Engineering Technology Forum was established in April 1997 at Seminole Community College (now Seminole State College). Since 1996 the ET Forum has been hosted in 21 Colleges around Florida. The membership includes the department heads and the leaders of the technology programs in the State of Florida. The Forum is a viable means for industry and educators across the state to meet regularly to discuss issues of the educating of tomorrow...

Every October Manufacturing takes center stage, as manufacturers in Florida and across the nation converge to celebrate excellence of American manufacturing. This year October 6 marks the official kick off for Manufacturing Day with widespread events scheduled to celebrate manufacturing throughout the month of October. Manufacturing Day/Month has taken a prominent role in Florida as the state has held #1 status for hosting the highest number of industry tours for students and manufacturing day events. Counties and cities across Florida have issued proclamations marking October as MFG Month. Regional manufacturers associations, schools districts, regional associations and manufacturers across Florida have once again partnered to make MFG Day a grand success. Thousands of students and educators from schools across Florida are set to participate in industry tours geared to showcase products that are “Made in Florida” as well as get an up-close look at high-skilled, high-wage careers in Fl...

October has been designated as Manufacturing Month.   We celebrate it all month but on the first Friday of the month we get to introduce middle and high school students to the manufacturing industry.   Since the start of manufacturing day/month in 2012, colleges especially the community colleges have seen an increase in admissions especially with the female students.   The following 5 women are historical influential women in manufacturing and serve as great role models. Margaret Knight ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_E._Knight ) was born in 1938 in York Maine.   After her father died, she and her family moved to Manchester, Maine where she went to school but left to work in a cotton mill.   While she was working there she witnessed an accident at the mill.   Two weeks after the accident she had invented a safety device that was adopted by Manchester Mills.   This safety devise was never patented.   In 1867 she moved to Springfield, Massa...

Florida’s manufacturing employment has grown steadily over the last 78 months after a rapid decline in the 4 years prior. [1] In June 2017, employment numbers returned to the 2009 level with a total 365,900 jobs throughout the state.   This current total employment represents an increase of 10,900 jobs since January 2016. [2]   These jobs are spread across 20,584 manufacturing establishments, also increasing steadily over the past several years. [3] This bodes well for the State’s manufacturing economy in that Florida has largely outpaced the rest of the nation in manufacturing job creation.   However, one key challenge is the fact that i n Florida, 80% of all manufacturing firms employ less than 20 people and over 99% are classified as small businesses.   Coupled with this challenge is the reality of the 21st century:   Baby boomers are leaving the technical workforce taking their valuable experience and skills with them. Technology is changing pace exponentia...

The Puzzle: https://flate-mif.blogspot.com/2017/08/stemat-word-puzzle-61-pump-part.html A new technician rebuilds positive displacement pumps for a customer that uses their pumps to transport viscous fluids. The Tech knows this customer always uses their pumps to move a fluid that gets thinner when the pump applies more pressure on that moving fluid. This puzzle can trigger discussions at multiple levels: the simple recognition that curve (a) and (c) are not linear and have, respectively, positive and negative slope values from the green dot on; visual approximations of slope magnitudes; an introduction to viscosity, shear, and shear rate;. With all three curves on one graph, the properties and uses of both dilatant and psuedoplastic fluids can be introduced. The most intense lesson would include Newton's law for Viscosity and the fully developed velocity profiles for flow of all three types of fluid that could entering a long pipe. The puzzle complements and reinforces the les...