Month: July 2016

Describe your internship experience. What was the most interesting moment? What was the biggest challenge? Describe what you saw and did: Did you see one aspect of a company or lab or did you visit different departments or sites? Did you work with a single mentor or multiple professionals? What was it like working with your mentor(s)? How did they open your eyes to a new industry or research? What is your biggest take away? NCCAT was an amazing experience. I would really love it if an experience like this could be utilized to develop educational resources. Where a group of teachers were put into teams to develop lessons around a theme or educational standard. Groups could give each other peer feedback through the process. I think that would be a fun and fulfilling process that would yield very high quality lessons very quickly. The challenge was the lack of focus. There were many obligations and objectives. Most of the experience felt scattered and schizophrenic. It was challenging to make the most of the opportunities provided as so many things competed for attention. We worked with several professors at NC state. We toured a variety of facilities related to the development of wearable devices. The mentors were very nice and spent some time exploring the techniques of selling and promoting ideas to others. The largest take away from these experiences were the need to teach students how to develop new ideas and engineering solutions to the problems we see in our lives.

You are creating a product that transfers your internship experience into educational resources. Please describe the challenges and successes you are experiencing.

The largest challenge that I faced during this fellowship is the same challenge that I face during the school year. There is always a time crunch. The scattered obligations posed a challenge to spending time developing a focused product. Additionally, the material itself, engineering and wearable devices is very difficult to shoehorn into the state mandated curriculum especially when the assist center has a list of requirements and expectations for the lesson plans as well. It was extremely challenging to develop a lesson that meets the requirements of the state, the mentors, is feasible in the time available, with the resources available, that is still interesting and relevant to students.

How do you see your internship experience benefitting your mentor’s organization?

The assist center may get a fresh perspective or potential new directions to take their development. While our projects and brainstorming might not be anywhere near a final project, simply the creative process might stimulate new ideas.

Students are told they have to go to school. They are told they need to take certain classes. In class they are told what they need to learn.

It is easy to see how certain students can object to this situation. Our challenge is to make the learning meaningful and something to be sought rather than assigned. While this is not a new thought, it does not seem to be widely implemented. One of the obstacles to the implementation is the