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Earlier this year, The New England Council (NEC) and Deloitte Consulting LLP released a report entitled, “Advanced to Advantageous: The Case for New England’s Manufacturing Revolution.” Responding to popular conceptions that manufacturing is declining in the northeast, the report, which expanded on a 2010 NEC-Deloitte study, revealed that the region is actually set to experience a manufacturing revolution. This is due in part to existing regional advantages as well as the replication and widespread adoption of a number of progressive programs and initiatives.

Despite the recession, advanced manufacturing has proven to be a resilient sector of the economy. In fact, as the report revealed, there are many areas in which New England is setting the pace in advanced manufacturing. These include “industry clusters,” such as medical devices and biotechnology, as well as “capability clusters,” like software and artificial intelligence, and “game-changers,” such as additive manufacturing and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Exploring Advanced Manufacturing is a free modular course at EducateWorkforce.com.

Exploring Advanced Manufacturing—an interactive, online course—offers an overview of manufacturing to help high school and two-year college students decide which type of manufacturing fits their interests and talents.

The course was created by two Advanced Technological Education centers with support from the National Science Foundation.  CA2VES, The Center for Aviation and Automotive Technology Education using Virtual E-Schools, provided the research based-instructional design of the six-module course. FLATE, the Florida Advanced Technological Education Center of Excellence, provided the manufacturing content.

The free course can be accessed at EducateWorforce.com.

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For the last several years at the HI-TEC conference a group of ATE grantees have shared tips, techniques, and tools that support dissemination and outreach. The ideas and strategies shared are created by and for ATE grantees, are designed to help broaden the impact of project and center work, and are free for anyone to use.  It’s always a great session but of course we only reach HI-TEC attendees; so after this year’s conference I thought it would be helpful to put together some of the information from the session to share with the rest of the community.

Dan Hull, OP-TEC's principal investigator, points out that the capacity of optical fibers to carry massive amounts of data in the form of light through hair-thin flexible strands of glass or plastic enables other technical advances. These include faster Internet speeds and enhanced endoscopic medical procedures.

When she makes a photonics recruiting presentation to women and girls, Carolyn Hulla-Meyer explains engineering in way that makes them see immediately that they can do it.

She asks them if they are crafters. Do they like to get on Pinterest? If they do, then, she says, “OK. That's a lot like engineering. You're just not told it’s engineering. It’s called crafting when you do it.ˮ

“It's just about staring those stereotypes in the face. Calling them out and then flipping them around so that the student can see it for what it is,ˮ she explains.

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Founded in 1993, the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) is a unique non-profit organization that serves as an invaluable academic and administrative resource. As a central source for student enrollment, performance, and degree information, educators, academic researchers, and policymakers use NSC data to explore the effects of various programs or policies on postsecondary attendance, persistence, and attainment. In fact, most school districts and offices of institutional research have come to rely on the NSC for its ability to provide time- and cost-saving benefits.

Over the past twenty years, the NSC has steadily expanded its scope and member participation. Today, there are more than 3,600 participating institutions representing 98% of all students enrolled in public and private two- and four-year colleges and universities across the United States. NSC makes member information available to the full education community; member institutions then use this data in their own activities (e.g. research efforts, outreach programs, recruitment, and much more), all in full compliance with FERPA. It is an extensive and uncommon resource designed to help facilitate institutional compliance, educational research, and administrative reporting.

High school students use 3-D modeling and other technologies to create solar-powered vehicles capable of crossing obstacle courses during the 2015 Career Pathways summer workshops on alternative energy at Seminole State College.

Faculty at Seminole State College of Florida hope to “green” technical students’ skills and expand non-science majors’ knowledge of environmental science in ways that pique their interest in STEM careers.

The mechanism to accomplish both tasks is a new 18-credit, six-course Sustainable Engineering Certificate. The certificate is the centerpiece of EMERGE-Establishing a Means for Effective Renewable/Green Energy, a project that recently received an Advanced Technological Education grant from the National Science Foundation.

Principal Investigator Jason Gaschel hopes the certificate program, which begins in Fall 2015, will help graduates differentiate themselves when they look for jobs and provide a framework for his college and others to add environmental sustainability content throughout their programs.

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The High-Impact Technology Exchange Conference (HI-TEC) is a national conference focused on defining advanced technical education systems that are streamlined to meet the demands of a 21st century workforce. The conference is held annually as part of the National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education Centers’ (NSF ATE) effort to promote excellence in career and technical education. Attracting secondary and postsecondary educators, career counselors, industry professionals, trade organizations, and technicians, HI-TEC has become an essential conference for those involved in training the future workforce for careers in the high-tech sectors that drive our nation's economy.

For HI-TEC veterans and novices alike, the list below provides fun facts, details, and information about this ATE community staple:

The Electrical Power Technology program at Palm Beach State College provides the context for an Integrated Math course that faculty are developing with ATE support.

The contextualized math program for secondary and postsecondary students that Palm Beach State College (PBSC) is launching with a new Advanced Technological Education grant fits with the college's strategic goal of boosting student retention and completion.

The new Intermediate Algebra course for postsecondary students will incorporate tactile experiences and authentic math problems from the college's Electrical Power Technology (EPT) and Engineering Technology (ET) associate of science degree programs.

Jay Matteson, principal investigator of the InnovATE project supported by the ATE grant, hopes the contextualized math will assist students—both teens and older adults—entering the EPT and ET programs with intellectual scaffolding that ignites their interest in STEM careers and fortifies their learning so they can succeed in college.

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As most ATE community members are aware, the National Science Foundation has, since early 2011, required that all grant applicants provide a one- to two-page supplementary document, known as the Data Management Plan (DMP), to describe how a grantee’s proposal will meet NSF guidelines on the dissemination of grant-funded research.  More recently, NSF has added a new requirement to the ATE RFP; namely, newly funded ATE projects and centers are now required to work with ATE Central to archive the valuable deliverables they create. Luckily, these requirements go hand-in-hand, as archiving with ATE Central may very well already be a strategy outlined in your DMP. Even if it isn’t, you may still choose to archive with us as a means to support your project or center goals.

Mark Jones, drafting supervisor at Nucor Vulcraft-SC (on the left), checks the work of Dean Mann, a 2015 graduate of Florence-Darlington Technical College. Mann is one of two 2015 spring interns from the two-year college to receive a full-time job offer from Nucor.

Nucor Vulcraft-SC Drafting Supervisor Mark Jones likes the combination of technical skills and behavioral attributes he sees among the technicians graduating from his alma mater, Florence-Darlington Technical College (FDTC).

His department just made full-time job offers to two of the four FDTC students who interned in the Drafting Department at Nucor Corporation's Florence, South Carolina, facility this spring.

Jones, who earned a civil engineering technology associate degree from FDTC in 1996, and this spring's Nucor interns were all taught with the problem-based curriculum that the South Carolina Advanced Technological Education Center (SC ATE) at FDTC refined and disseminated with support from National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education program. SC ATE's curriculum uses a just-in-time format that blends academic core courses and hands-on technical skills with instruction about self-management and teamwork that many employers call soft skills.

"When we hire those students coming out of Tech, with two-year associate degrees, they have a really great foundation to start building on. It really shows through," Jones said.