You Missed a Good One

Back in July, the Maricopa Advanced Technology Education Center (MATEC) held its annual conference, this time in Albuquerque at the Hyatt. MATEC is an NSF-funded Advanced Technology Education (ATE) center and does a great deal of good work in developing materials and programs in semiconductor, electronics and manufacturing. A good example is the Work-Ready Electronics project with the great online tutorials. (www.work-readyelectronics.org) The conference is called Semiconductors, Automated Manufacturing, Electronics Training and Educations Conference (SAME-TEC). There was a turn out of about 300 community college instructors and administrators plus good industry representation. The workshops and sessions were terrific as usual.

There is no way I can summarize all what went on here but the main sessions are posted on the MATEC website . Go to matec.org, and look under conferences. There is a list of the presentations and a batch of photos.

I would particularly like you to look at the session by Garry Mullett of Springfield Technical Community College. The paper he gave was titled "Are the Electronics Technology Departments of Today Destined to Become Academic Service Departments of Tommorrow?" Gary puts forth most of the arguments and issues I have been hammering on here for the past year or so. He makes a lot of the same points and some new observations as well. As I told the audience after his presentation, "Everything he says is true."

One of the more interesting sessions was a special workshop put on by MATEC. It was an extra cost option to the conference and we had about 21 faculty and industry people show up for it. The title was "Designing the Electronics Curriculum for the 21st Century". It was our attempt to initiate some real action in changing the curriculum to reflect what is really going on in the jobs and industry. The panelists were Roy Brixen of the College of San Mateo, Wayne Philips of Chabot College, Tom McGlew of MATEC and myself, Lou Frenzel of Electronic Design magazine. We first presented some background about the declining enrollments problem then described some of the changes occuring in some schools around the country. In summary, we all agreed that the current curricula leave something to be desired. It is dated and skewed from what industry really wants and needs. Virtually all agreed, industry participants included, that we need less circuit analysis and design and more system level coverage in the courses. The current curricula and courses still focus too much on discrete components and circuits while technician work in the real world is at a board, module and equipment level. We discussed several ways to address that problem.

The afternoon session of the workshop had the participants divide up into four groups to beat out their version of a new curriculum. The results are too volumous to display here, but they all point in the direction of less circuits and more systems. The lack of textbooks to implement this approach was discussed although no solution was recommended. Electronics editor Jonathan Plant from McGraw Hill was there to hear what he needs to do. Thanks for being there, Jonathan.

Real progress was made, I think. The big problem is getting the results of this workshop out to the rest of you who are gutsy enough to attempt to bring your program kicking and screaming into the 21st century. MATEC recently submitted a proposal to NSF for a three year project to make this happen. Let's hope they win.

You may want to factor the SAME-TEC conference into your summer plans next year. It will be held in Texas, Dallas, I think. Check the MATEC website for details next year.