Establishing a High School / Engineering Partnership With a Simple Industrial Process Control Module

摘要

Too few high school students understand that a technical career path can genuinely be exciting and neat. Some have the short-term view that good paying jobs are plentiful, so why take the really difficult courses. Many sell their own abilities short and convince themselves that it is too difficult a career path. And still others conjure up the image of a dirty, dull, dangerous, and demeaning factory floor and run (not walk) in the other direction. What is needed to turn these impressions around are exciting exposures to technical topics in existing high school curriculums such as technology education, science, math and physics. The purpose of this paper is to identify exactly one such exciting module that has been successfully used to build bridges that link high school students to industrial technology and engineering technology career paths. This presentation will identify specific outcomes that resulted from an extremely cost-efficient program. The success and simplicity of the program encourages it's continuance with existing high schools and even growth into a greater geographical area. Institutions seeking higher student enrollments in technical degree paths may wish to consider replicating this simple and exciting programmable logic controller module. This strong recruiting tool has provided us a pipeline of talented new students into the university program.