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By GLEN WERLING
Firing the interest of students in engineering is the prime objective of Project Lead the Way, currently challenging students at Southern Wells High School.
Technology education teacher Doug Hunt explained that Project Lead the Way (PLTW) is a national non-profit organization established to help schools give students the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in high tech fields. “It gives them an insight into what being an engineer is like and helps them to make the decision before college if engineering is a career they really want to pursue,” said Hunt.
The program originally started out as an effort to get more females interested in engineering careers, but has expanded since then to include all students.
The high school program is a four-year sequence of courses combining mathematics and science courses in an effort to introduce students to the scope, rigor and discipline of engineering before entering college.
PLTW has a high school curriculum that centers on developing better problem solving skills by immersing students in real-world engineering problems.
While the program is aimed at grades 9-12, Southern Wells has just completed the first year of PLTW, so the introductory program, Introduction to Engineering Design, was open to students at all grade levels. The only requirement at this point is that students have to have completed Algebra I.
Introduction to Engineering Design deals with any of the visual communication and design concepts common to any engineering specialization, said Hunt. It’s a course that teaches problem-solving skills using a design development process. Models of product solutions are created, analyzed and communicated using solid modeling computer design software, he added.
“Students in the class spent quite a bit of time on pre-engineering sketching, understanding 3-D representations,” said Hunt. Using what they learned, the students used a 3-D design software titled Autodesk Inventor.
The tech education department in the past has used similar software, so launching into Autodesk Adventure was not a completely alien concept.
“Autodesk’s real strength is that students can see at any shape or angle the project they are working on,” said Hunt. “If they want to make changes to their project, they can do it. They can add a hole to the project, change the size of the hole, cut an angle off—whatever they want or need to do the project, they can do it with Autodesk” he added.
This year, 10 students participated in the class.
“The whole experience was very positive. We had a very good outcome and we were very excited about it,” said Hunt. “The classroom atmosphere, the student response, their interest in the projects, their performance on the end-of-year course assessment, was all positive,” he added.
Comments from several of the students match Hunt’s description.
“This class is cool because we get to use the same programs as real engineers,” stated Gage Minniear.
“The class is interesting because of the drafting and sketching you can do on Inventor,” noted Josh Levanchy.
“I like this class and found it fun and interesting learning all of the aspects of engineering design,” said Andrew Huffman.
And...
“This class has taught me a lot about engineering and how to draw sketches in Inventor,” wrote Jason Christman.
PLTW has been a nice compliment to the high school’s existing tech-ed curriculum, said Hunt. “The difference between technology education and PLTW is that PLTW is geared more toward the engineering profession and moves at a very quick pace,” said Hunt. Tech-ed explores the history of a variety of technical fields while PLTW focuses on the here and now of engineering, he said.
“It’s a good fit in overall terms of what we’re doing here at Southern Wells,” Hunt added.
Plans are to offer the second course in the program, Principles of Engineering, for the 2008-09 school year. Principles of Engineering is designed to help students understand the field of engineering and engineering technology by exploring various technology systems and manufacturing processes. It also teaches students how engineers and technicians use math, science and technology in an engineering problem solving process to benefit people.
The course also includes concerns about social and political consequences of technological change.
The program will be funded by a Tech-Prep grant from the Indiana Department of Education through the Area 18 Vocational Education Cooperative that was awarded to Southern Wells last month.
Hunt hopes to use the grant to purchase some additional equipment including a tensile tester to test the strength of materials.
He also hopes to purchase FischerTechniks that use a combination of building blocks and erector set-type materials along with motors, computer interfacing and sensors allowing students to build different solutions to posed design challenges, interfacing with the computer.
A portion of the grant will also pay for a very intensive two-week training session for Hunt.
The plans are to alternate the two classes. In even years in the fall, the classes will start out with the Introduction to Engineering Design. In odd years, the course offered in the fall will be Principles of Engineering.
The plan is once the program is fully implemented at the other Area 18 cooperative schools to offer the introductory courses at Southern Wells and then be able to send the students to one of the other schools in the cooperative to continue their education in PLTW. “If you start as a freshman, there will be a Project Lead the Way class—or two—to pick from every year,” said Hunt.
glenw@news-banner.com