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ON THE ROAD This month FLATE had the opportunity to visit two two-year advanced manufacturing and mechatronics programs in Virginia:   Piedmont Virginia Community College (PVCC) in Charlottesville and Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke (VWCC).   PVCC was hosting an outreach event for high school programs to introduce the students to their new program launched this academic year. Over one hundred twenty juniors and seniors from 4 regional high schools arrived at the college for a 10 am program start. After welcome from the program director and dean, a lively panel of local manufacturing and production employers talked to the young people about their companies and what they make.   They went on to talk about the kinds of skills new employees need to have to be hire and successful in their companies.   The business sectors represented all voiced the need for some common fundamental technical skills like measurements, electronics and quality. They also strongl...

FRESHMEN AND STEM:   The   Indicators   reports: "In 2016 about 45% of freshmen indicated they planned to major in an S&E field (up from about 8% in 2000); about 16% in the biological and agricultural sciences; 11% in engineering; 10% in the social and behavioral sciences; 6% in mathematics, statistics, or computer sciences; and 3% in the physical sciences." Other Highlights:  "Between 2012 and 2015, the number of S&E associate’s degrees continued to increase despite a decline in the number of associate’s degrees awarded in computer sciences." "The number of associate’s degrees in S&E technologies, not included in S&E degree totals because of their applied focus, grew by 72% since 2000. In 2015, about 144,000 associate’s degrees were awarded in S&E technologies, down from 166,000 in 2012. The proportion of associate’s degrees in engineering technologies . . . has declined from 48% of all S&E technologies degrees in 2000 to 24% in 2015 (o...

The   sTEm-at Work Puzzle series is on hiatus.   It is likely the series will return.   However, as its slips out the door heading toward Hyannis Port, today's FLATE FOCUS has a reminder of what the puzzles are trying to do. The puzzles presented in the sTEm-at Work Puzzle series provided tools for that task.   The puzzles are cast within situations a technician might become involved with and at the level that the technician is expected to handle.   The visually striking qualities of these puzzles is there lack of specific values for the scalars represented as independent and dependent variables.   In addition, the plots presented (line, sinusoids, and exponentials) represent common waveforms that a technician is likely to encounter.      The intent here is to provide instructional avenues to the various measurement systems that are used to quantize the situation described by the scalars in the plot. The lack of specifics also directs the stu...

ROAD TRIP! Last month, Kevin Finan and eight of his machining program seniors form Atlantic Technical College in Broward County took a road trip to USF College of Engineering and the Haas Outlet in Tampa.  Kevin is a firm believer that providing students exposure to various opportunities for his students after graduation is very important.  First hand exposure to various programs and levels of post-secondary education and various workplace settings is extremely helpful for young people when they are trying to identify what they want to do and where they might fit into the future.  Often students know right way after making a visit to a company, college or university that that is a place they want work or, equally important, that it’s NOT a place can see themselves in the future.  The students had a great time, asked a lot of good questions at both “stops” on their “road trip”.  At the Haas Outlet, they of course learned about the latest CNC technologies and abou...

FLATE & St. John State Join efforts to Recruit & Retain Women in STEM Careers Pathways All across the board educators, advisors, counselors and industry leaders are increasingly voicing a real and ever-present challenge of recruiting and retaining women in STEM careers. To address some of these concerns, and to start a platform for an open dialogue, FLATE—NSF Center of Excellence in Advanced Technological Education presented a workshop hosted by St. John River State College (SJRSC), Orange Park Campus in Orange Park, FL.  The professional development workshop, “Recruiting Girls for STEM Pathways”, featured best practices for educators, recruiters, counselors, advisors, and anyone interested in promoting STEM careers to women and girls. Participants who attended the workshop had the opportunity to interact with a panel of two STEM female experts and one female STEM student, explored STEM based resources, shared current female recruitment practices and engaged in teamwork to ...

                                    In the last FLATE FOCUS we started the conversation about Florida achieving manufacturing excellence. FLATE's part of that quest is the connection between quality and excellence expectations on the manufacturing floor and the workforce that provides the mechanism to achieve those expectations. The hard part of technical workforce development is reflected in the reality that the manufacturers alone cannot create the workforce that optimally complements the advanced technologies these manufacturers are simultaneously inserting into their manufacturing environments. To be sure, manufacturers do get great initial technical support from their equipment suppliers but those efforts are focused on installation and startup. Long term integration of new technologies into the main stream of a specific company’s manufacturing process and the accompanying protocols in a speci...

What is Needed Math (for entry-level technicians)? A common barrier for post-secondary technical education programs is the mathematics skills and knowledge of entering students. Related issues that must be triangulated with incoming students’ math levels are (1) college degree mathematics requirements; (2) specific math needed to support the technical program content; (3) the content and length of the courses in which the needed math is typically covered; and (4) restrictions on the length of the degree or certificate program. Over the holiday weekend last month, approximately 60 secondary and post-secondary educators, industry representatives and mathematics education experts convened in Baltimore for an intense three days defining the issues, specific math skills and knowledge, what is needed for student success.  This gathering was coordinated by a National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education (NSF ATE) funded conference grant (DUE #1737946) award to Hofstra Unive...