High School Technology Initiative

The goals of the High School Technology Initiative (HSTI) are to attract and retain more high school students in science and technology career paths. Today's high school students, while familiar with high technology as users, frequently fail to connect underlying scientific principles to the technologies that enable their lives in so many ways. The objective of this project is to create curriculum content modules that engender an interest in pursuing technology, engineering, or science related careers by providing students with connections between technology and its underlying science as part of state mandated science instruction.

The HSTI team consists of high school science teachers from schools in the greater Tampa Bay region, the University of South Florida (USF) Engineering College, Hillsborough Community College (HCC) faculty, engineering graduate students, and professional multimedia and video personnel.

Each HSTI educational module contributes to the project goals and objectives by:

1. Providing instructional materials to teachers on topics they currently teach, but packaged in the context of high technology examples that are relevant to their students' everyday lives.

2. Providing the curriculum material in a high-tech, computer based presentation format so the lessons grab the student's interest and hold their attention.

3. Making the materials easy to use by including detailed instructions and suggestions on how to use the curriculum materials as well as background materials about the engineering and technology involved.

4. Making the instructional materials integrate throughout all levels of high school physical sciences (chemistry, physics, and physical science) and some mathematics courses so students work with the same concepts several times during their high school studies but from different perspectives and to different depths and details.

HSTI was created as a follow up and extension to a traditional set of high school pipeline activities for science teachers. USF and HCC presented these pipeline activities as participants in an NSF Advanced Technology Education grant (DUE-9950106) aimed at developing a high technology workforce for semiconductor manufacturing industries within the State of Florida. During these workshop-type activities to increase technology awareness, teachers requested materials for classroom use, but also stipulated a number of constraints for any materials produced. Continued interaction with a group of teachers resulted in the HSTI curriculum concept and initial material development.

This project is serving to refine materials currently under development and create, evaluate, and distribute two additional modules. Additionally, HSTI is providing an array of science and mathematics teachers' professional development opportunities to teach the teachers about the technologies integrated into the modules and also to provide them with hands-on training experience for using the multimedia materials (CD navigation, downloads, altering and adapting, etc). Finally, an efficient and cost-effective nationwide distribution system for the materials is being developed with the help of MATEC (Maricopa Advanced Technology Education Center).