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.

ATE Adds Diversity to the Technical Workforce

In an interview for the ATE@20 book, which ATE Central and the Internet Scout Research Group published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the ATE program, Carter talked about how ATE increases the diversity of the nation's technical workforce at the same time it develops highly qualified technicians for businesses and industries that are critical for the nation's economy and security. (Email ate20@atecentral.net for free copies of the ATE@20 book.)

Carter, who was a biotechnology professor at Foothill College prior to joining NSF as a permanent program director, said she hopes the ATE program will continue to serve a wide array of student populations. These include teens fresh out of high school, working adults who have not engaged in formal education for many years, and degree holders who need to update their skills.

"There's a tremendous range of students. That's one of the things that I think is a real strength of the ATE program. All of those people who walk into those ATE programs have a real desire to move forward and to gain the skills and competencies and the educational background and concepts that will allow them to be successful on the job. They're just really motivated and dynamic people.

"So one of the things I want to keep supporting through the program is the diversity of people and the kinds of programs that faculty have put together that I think really are on the cutting edge of industry," Carter said.

The diverse student populations Carter referred to were evident at the ATE conference where African Americans, Latinos, immigrants, women, middle-aged men, and teens exhibited information about the ATE programs in which they participate.

Young Woman and Middle-aged Man Gain Work Experiences from Capstone Projects

For Mateen the opportunity to present her designs to a real estate developer, who asked for the students to design a "pocket neighborhood" of cottages, was a milestone experience to go along with her degree. "We don't know if he'll go through with it, but it was really good opportunity to incorporate everything we've learned from HVAC [heating, ventilation and air conditioning] to electrical to renewables to construction," she said. The experience of calculating heat loads and organizing the presentation of sustainable energy options for an entire housing development provided lessons that Mateen now uses daily in her job.

Since she graduated from LCC in May 2013 with an associate degree in Energy Management and a certificate in Energy Auditing, Mateen has worked for Dr. Energy Saver. The company does residential energy audits. As an energy auditor, she uses basic technical skills like operating a thermal imaging camera to identify energy leaks and more complex architecture skills to design energy conservation remedies for homeowners. The soft skills that are part of LCC's curriculum also help her present information to homeowners and guide them through the process of applying for utility rebates for improving the energy efficiency of their houses.

Exhibiting the designs for his capstone project—renovation plans for a foreclosed home that a nonprofit organization with sell to a low-income family—in the showcase booth with Mateen was Scott DeRuischer. He's been a licensed building contractor for more than a decade. He enrolled in LCC's Architecture Technology program when the economy slowed to learn how to draw the additions and renovations clients want. His business has picked up since he completed his associate degree in May 2013. He's also found another use for his talents: LCC hired him as an adjunct instructor for its building trades program.

Urban College Interns Run Tech Support Center

At another booth, Roger Andamo Kiel, a May 2013 from City College of San Francisco, explained how an ATE grant is helping to start the TechSpot technical support center run by student interns. The grant will pay the student interns, who are from populations underrepresented in information technology (IT) and computer science fields, to repair computers and to operate an online tech support service.

"Work experience from a community college is significant. It's very impressive on a resume or an application," Kiel said, explaining his hope that the CCSF-affiliated internship will provide the evidence of on-the-job experience he needs to get a full-time IT job. Carmen Lamha, chairman of the college's Computer Networking and Information Technology Department, said the program will also help students who want to start their own computer service businesses.

High School Student Works with University Student Team

Among the youngest students to participate in the ATE showcase was Neil Gramopadhye, a freshman at Riverside High School in Greer, South Carolina. He tested the navigation aids within the virtual reality simulations that Clemson University students created at the Center For Aviation and Automotive Technology Education (CA²VES).

The Clemson student team included Jeffrey Bertrand, a computer science major; Tianwei Wang, a mechanical engineering major; and Myrtede C. Alfred, an industrial engineering major.

To build the simulation for an online course to teach South Carolina technical college students how to prevent hazards in the workplace, Bertrand wrote the software code; Wang used computer-aided design to create the three-dimensional virtual environment; Alfred gathered information about automotive manufacturing processes and wrote the text content and audio narratives; and Gramapadhye tested the simulation with 20 people to see how they responded to various conditions within the simulation.

"You can think of this as making a video game; under the hood it's exactly the same," Bertrand said. The collaboration of people from different academic disciplines also matches the high-tech environments the students hope to work in.