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We are pleased to share Biotechnology Resources for the College Classroom, the first post in our new From the Archive blog series. Each From the Archive blog post will highlight a few selected resources from the ATE Central resource portal to further promote the work of the ATE community. This month, we’re highlighting the work of three ATE projects and centers that have created a wide variety of presentations, lessons, activities, course outlines, and more. These resources illustrate the breadth and depth of the biotechnology curriculum represented in the ATE Central resource portal and may be useful to STEM educators across bio and chemical technology sectors.

Overall, the SFAz+8 colleges have seen significant year-to-year increases in the STEM student pipeline in their outreach programs, early college programs, internships, and degree and certificate program enrollments and completions.

When developing STEM outreach activities the task of obtaining high quality photos for use in online or print publications is often such a low priority that photos are forgotten completely or snapped quickly with a smart phone.

The resulting images may provide evidence that an event happened but lack the pop that can engage audiences’ attention in the important work that educators do.  

After submitting multiple first-rate photos for the ATE Impacts 2018-2019 publication, which will be published this year by Internet Scout Research Group (home to ATE Central), Regina Abraham shared the following tips for obtaining great photos and making sure the college has signed photos release forms from the people in them:

• Arrange in advance for a professional photographer to work at the event.
• Have participants or, in the case of minors, their parents sign photo releases when they register for the event.
• Use color coding on participants’ name tags to indicate those who are willing to be photographed.
• Provide clear directions to the photographer about who can be photographed.  
• Announce when media professionals are present so that individuals who do not want to be photographed can move out of camera range for a few minutes.

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When taking notes in a classroom, is it better use a laptop or write them out on paper? Surprisingly, a new Brookings report shows that students who note-take by hand earn better grades than those who opt to use a laptop during a lecture. Furthermore, evidence points to students actually learning less when using a laptop during class than their classmates who do not. 

Researchers at Princeton and the University of California, Los Angeles carried out a randomized experiment with a group of students. Randomly assigned either a laptop or pen and paper to take notes, the researchers had students watch a lecture and then take a standardized test. The test results showed that students using laptops scored substantially worse. 

Why is this? Researchers hypothesize that, because we can type faster than we can write, words basically bypass major cognitive processing in the brain. In contrast, when taking notes by hand, the brain has to process and condense the material before we put pen to paper, which results in a better understanding of the content of the lecture. In the experiment performed by researchers, the laptop notes more closely resembled transcripts while hand-written notes resembled summaries of the lecture. 

It was also determined that using a laptop during class is distracting to other classmates. In one of the studies outlined in the report, students were randomly assigned short tasks to perform while in class during a lecture, such as looking up movie times or going on Facebook. It was found that content on the laptop visible to other students served as enough of a distraction to lower test scores of students near those who were multi-tasking by 11%. In addition, students who were near those who were multitasking on their laptops scored 17 % lower on the comprehension section of the test. 

View the full report at the Brookings Institute site for more information and to read about additional experiments. 
 

A Snow College agriculture student uses a drone to check the dispersal of water from GPS-controlled sprinkler heads on a center pivot irrigation system.

When the number of agriculture (Ag) majors dropped to six in 2011, Snow College (Ephraim, Utah) leaders considered closing the department. Instead they revamped it to focus on agriculture business skills for family farmers.

By adding agriculture-related advanced technology content to existing STEM courses with the goal of helping small farmers run their operations efficiently, the college has restructured its agriculture offerings with the addition of twelve courses and two faculty members. Students have responded enthusiastically to the change. In fall 2017, 181 students took agriculture courses and Snow College had 128 declared agriculture majors.  

“To me it’s looking at the pieces of the puzzle, and re-configuring those pieces into programs,” said Jay Olsen, director of Agriculture and Farm/Ranch Management at Snow College.

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Sustainability is a critical topic for ATE grantees. Whether you are part of a small project just starting out, or working with a well-seasoned center that has been funded for a decade, considering sustainability at every stage will strengthen the odds of ensuring deliverables and activities continue to be available for the long haul.

To help support project and center sustainability planning and activities, and in collaboration with ITHAKA S&R, ATE Central has been offering webinars and workshops each year on an array of sustainability-related topics. This season, Rachael Bower from ATE Central and Nancy Maron, from BlueSky to BluePrint, will focus on topics useful to centers and projects at all stages of growth. This series addresses three critical angles – first, a basic “health check” to see how your project or center is faring today; second, strategies for moving forward, with a refreshed set of goals and priorities; and finally, taking to heart the need to plan for changes concerning the most valuable asset any project has: its people.

St. Paul College alumni Brandon Young, Tasha Spencer, and Megan McDonald identified many positive aspects of conducting authentic research while enrolled in the Science Instrumentation Technician program at the Minnesota community college. They shared their research findings at the 2017 ATE Principal Investigators Conference.

Nanotech research helped three Saint Paul College alumni move closer to their STEM career goals.

Saint Paul College students who enroll in the Science Instrumentation Technician associate degree program at the Minnesota Community and Technical College have the opportunity to work on authentic research projects thanks to the collaborative with industry the college formed with the support of a National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education grant. (DUE #136157)

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This recent Pew Research Center report details the trends in technology usage among older Americans age 65 and above. Broadband internet usage and smartphone adoption have dramatically increased within the last five years, making the current generation of seniors the most digitally-connected in history. Although there is a definite uptick in technology adoption, there still seems to be a digital divide among seniors with lower levels of education and income.

Approximately four-in-ten (42%) of senior adults report owning smartphones and 67% of seniors report using the internet, which marks a 55-percentage-point increase in about 20 years. Despite the increase, one-third of seniors report never using the internet, while 49% report not having broadband internet in their homes.

Technology adoptions rates differ dramatically when also evaluating education and income. 87% of seniors who earn $75,000 and above report having broadband internet in their homes, in comparison with just 27% of seniors earning $30,000 or below. Around two-thirds of seniors with bachelor’s or advanced degrees report owning smartphones (65%), compared with 45% of those who have some college experience and 27% of those who have high school diplomas or less.

These findings are based on several nationally representative Pew Research Center surveys. The main findings on technology adoption are from a phone survey of 3,015 U.S. adults conducted Sept. 29-Nov. 6, 2016.

Visit the Pew Research Center for the full report.

City Tech students Jiaman Zhao, Mohamed Alborati, and Teddie Lai demonstrate the movements they programmed into the prosthetic hand they created, and the sensor data they utilize during a breakfast round table at the 2017 ATE Principal Investigators Conference. (Photo by Madeline Patton)

A cross-discipline capstone project at the New York City College of Technology (City Tech) led students Jiaman Zhao, Mohamed Alborati, and Teddie Lai to change their career plans.

At the 2017 ATE Principal Investigators Conference the three associate degree graduates exhibited the prosthetic hand with embedded sensors that they fabricated with a 3-D printer and programmed using multiple hardware and software systems. In interviews they explained the project's unexpected impact on their lives: Zhao wants to work in a hospital prosthetics department while he completes his bachelor's degree; Alborati changed his major from mechanical engineering to computer engineering; and Lai plans to be a prosthetics designer rather than enter the military as a computer technician.

"Of course we are going to make it better," and "We have a lot of options," are just two of Lai's statements that sum up the students' takeaways from the ATE-funded mechatronics project (#1601522) that has computer science and electro-mechanical technology students create medical devices together.

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As many of us are aware, taking summer classes can be a good way for students to accelerate their studies or lessen the credit load for fall and spring semesters. But, what if they can’t afford to do so? In a report released in August by the Community College Daily, representatives from several community colleges across the U.S. expressed relief and overwhelming positivity toward the new Pell grant expansion.

The year-round Pell was previously available during the 2009-2011 academic years. Congress restored it this May, allowing it to go into effect as of July 2017, though many community colleges were not able to offer Pell grants this summer because most students had already completed their financial aid applications when the year-round Pell was approved. It seems that most colleges are ready to offer the Pell for summer of 2018. 

Leslie Buse, Assistant Director of Financial Aid at Northeast Iowa Community College (NICC) said that having summer Pell grants to look forward to “opens up a whole new avenue of relief for students. ” She referenced one student who had been at a four-year college, didn’t graduate and enrolled at NICC to get some job skills but is carrying a large amount of student debt. “It becomes so stressful for students trying to figure this out,” she said.

The year-round Pell can especially be of use to older, working students who are enrolled in career and technical programs. Having to take the summer off means more time needed in the long run to complete a program. Sarah Armstrong Tucker, chancellor of the West Virginia Community and Technical College System said that not being able to offer the Pell Grant year-round has negatively impacted industry partners, or, employers of their graduates. “They have a need for employees all year; it’s not based on the academic calendar,” said Tucker, who emphasized the point during a Senate hearing this spring.

A report released this summer by the Community College Research Center shows that summer enrollment increased by 27 percentage points for each $1,000 of year-round Pell grant funding per student. This is particularly significant since the completion rate for associates degree has shown to increase by 2.2 percentage points since the re-institution of the year-round Pell.

The full report is available to read on Community College Daily's website.

The Mechatronics Community Exchange (MEC) is a forum for instructors of automated manufacturing and robotics to identify related needs and the means to fulfill them. It uses monthly group Skype calls and an ATE Central microsite to share resources.

For years, Virginia Western Community College Automated Manufacturing Instructor Dan Horine has been searching for more affordable equipment to teach mechatronics in high schools. By the end of the Mechatronics Community Exchange (MEC) call on Friday, October 27, he was persuaded that the Low Cost Mechatronics Trainer built by Anne Arundel Community College Associate Professor Tim Callinan could be what he's been seeking. "It's amazing," Horine said.

The trainer Callinan built for Team CollaborATE—an ATE project that involves Anne Arundel, College of Lake County, and Florida State College at Jacksonville—costs about $1,500 and can be used simultaneously by two students in a lab. The $7,000 cost of comparable commercial equipment has inhibited expansion of mechatronics programs at high schools and colleges. Team CollaborATE provides detailed instructions to build the trainer, which uses mechatronics' key electrical, mechanical and computer technologies.

Watch the video that Callinan narrates at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBGCg_1LQHw. Listen to the recording of the Skype group discussion about the trainer at https://ate.community/MCE, the Mechatronics Community Exchange microsite that ATE Central hosts for this group of ATE educators.

ATE Central's Microsite Service is free to all ATE centers and projects. Its drop-and-drag interface is easy to use and accommodates photos and multi-page documents. To begin the process of creating a microsite send an email to microsites@atecentral.net.