Author: Janice M. Tkaczyk, M.Ed., CAGS, National Director Counselor and Academic Relationships at Universal Technical Institute

It’s only January, but the end of the school year will be here before you know it. And with the end of the school year comes a crossroads for many students. While a majority of graduating seniors are ready to pack up and head to college, many others are still figuring out what they want to do with their lives post high school. It can be a trying time for students who are unsure what type of career they want to pursue or success they want to achieve. It’s likely that several of these students are sitting in your computer science (CS) lab right now, and it’s time to start talking to them about their options.

Not every student wants to attend college, and more specifically, not every CS student wants to be a computer engineer. A four-year degree is not the only way to an in-demand career in a high-tech industry, yet many students are simply unware of the good-paying technical jobs that exist today. Students who chose to enroll in CS courses, which are typically not required to graduate, do so because they have a passion for technology and problem solving. We need to embrace this passion by providing students with the tools and resources they need to make smart decisions about their futures to pursue a career that will lead to long-term success, and we must start including options that do not require a four-year degree.

Post-secondary technical education is a smart option for many students. It provides them with the skills they need for in-demand careers, including those in the manufacturing, health care and transportation industries. Technical schools offer practical, high-tech and industry-specific training that is simply not available in many traditional academic settings. For example, Universal Technical Institute (UTI) prepares students for long-term and rewarding careers in the transportation industry. These jobs are in-demand, pay well, can’t be outsourced and offer plenty of opportunities to move up. UTI has a single goal: to give students an education that sets them up for a successful career.

And now you might be thinking, “What does this have to do with computer science?”

There’s long been a stigma that a career in the transportation industry is a “dirty” job. While this was true decades ago, the modern day repair shop is more like a high-tech computer lab than you may think.

The high-end cars of today have more than 40 sensors and 50 computers all interacting as we drive. The sophisticated network in our car doesn’t just give us a warning when we’re encountering a crash, it fully applies the brakes, rolls up the windows, tightens the seatbelts, closes the sunroof and adjusts the seats to a safer position – all because one system can talk to the entire car. But that’s just one element of the sophisticated computer systems in today’s vehicles. Advanced technologies also help clean up car emissions. With fuel injection, a closed loop feedback system and our newest catalytic converters todays cars turn CO, HC, and NOx into CO2 and H2O. This gives us better performance, lower emissions and good fuel economy. Pretty impressive, and it takes a highly skilled technician to know how to maintain and fix these sophisticated systems. Yesterday’s mechanic is today’s service technician.

At UTI, students learn on the latest high-tech vehicles, and our curriculum is rooted in STEM and presented in practical ways that work for hands-on learners. We have partnerships with more than 30 manufacturers to deliver an education that’s built around employers’ needs and gives our students the technical and professional skills it takes to be successful in today’s transportation industry. While many college graduates are competing for a handful of jobs in their field or moving back home, transportation service technicians are in demand.

It’s time to empower students who are fluent in technology, geniuses at fixing things and action-oriented to make decisions about their future that will lead to success and happiness. For too long, we’ve pressured students to take the “right” path – attend college, earn a degree and land a good job. But as educators, we know that there is not a one size fits all approach for every student. We need to help students who have a passion for technology and mechanics, but perhaps don’t excel at book learning, pursue a career that makes them happy and leads to a lifetime of success.

Janice M. Tkaczyk, M.Ed., CAGS, is the National Director for Counselor and Academic Relations at Universal Technical Institute. She spent 35 years in public education, 30 as the Guidance Director at a regional, technical high school. She has been professionally active at the local, state and national levels and is an Adjunct Professor at UMass Boston in the Master’s Program for professional school counselors.

Submitted by Emily Peed

Emily is an undergraduate college student and an entrepreneur. She has a strong interest in creating open source technologies, educational technologies, and pushing a movement of a cleaner form of computing. She is currently looking to build her resource platform at developersclubonline.com to help provide higher quality and more accessible technology resources. She is seeking dedicated, self-motivated volunteers to help. She currently attends online school through the University of Southern New Hampshire for Game Development and Design.

Developers’ Club is working to become an Open Source resource platform. I started this program as an after-school program during High School. During my time in High School I became involved with NCWIT, or the National Center for Women and Information Technology. Through them I was able to obtain the AspireIT Grant in college, which was a grant that focused on increasing female participation rates in technology at the middle school level. Through the grant I ran my first set of afterschool programs. It was a 3 site program that ran for most of the 2013 – 2014 school year, ending with a catered banqueted awards ceremony. During its duration it exposed 60 girls, and 64 students total, to hundreds of hours worth of technology education.

Developers’ Club is working to become the one stop shop for technology education by offering free modular tutorial series, structured learning content, source code downloads, 3D Printed/Raspberry Pi based hardware kits, and tools for student, teacher, and parent use. It is gearing up to encompass all K-12 education. Alongside our resources, we are also creating deployable after-school programs. Our platform is going to take a few years to build, but as we hopefully gain community support we will see our resources grow faster. We are gearing up to release our programs again in February of 2015 for a 16 week testing period, before resuming our normal year long duration for the 2015-2016 school year. Students are not required to participate for the entire year, we just want to offer a space year round for students who may have to juggle responsibilities to other after-school
obligations and programs.

Aspects of this program are under development, but if you go to developersclubonline.com, you will be able to see our dates for release of content, our campaign to create our imaginative and educational kits, and other important information about contributions, donations, and even possible sponsorships of the Developers’ Club platform and the associated programs. It also contains information on what is required to start an after-school program, the responsibilities of those who choose to execute the after-school programs, and other general program information. The program is set up to be an umbrella program, meaning we offer a wide variety of programs.

We will have programs that focus on increasing female participation and general participation rates in technology. Our after-school programs will be kicking off in February 2015. One of our more innovative programs, however, will be released over the Summer of 2015 and this will take a focus on clean computing.

The program is set to run for four months. Over the four months, participants will learn how to program, work with and assemble their Raspberry Pi based weather station or simple solar panel, gain insight into the computing industry when it comes to production, use, and disposal methods. They will also learn about the environment, renewable energies, and what the future could look like with a cleaner form of computing. The after-school programs are built to run for four months; however, due to the modular style of our resources the program can be expanded and contracted to meet different school and after-school facility needs. Students would primarily spend their time learning about technology, programming, and if they have purchased a hardware kit they would work on building that.

For our after-school programs we end with a celebration! There is an end of the program awards ceremony where students receive certificates, recognition, and celebrate their accomplishments and participation in the program.

To elaborate on the term “clean computing,” there is a need for computing to become more biodegradable, renewable, and environmentally friendly. We have issues with the handling of E-Wastes, production, and energy consumption issues within computing that are only going to compound as technology becomes more integral to our lives. In the United States, which we are believed to be the largest producer of e-waste in the world, has been estimated that well over one hundred million computers, monitors, and televisions become obsolete each year. This trend is just growing year by year. E-Wastes consist of small and large appliances, batteries, technology, etc. Technology accounts
for more than half of this E-Waste, however, as much as 57%. The United Nations estimates that the world total generates twenty to fifty million tons of E-Waste each year.
We are improperly disposing of them when we do take the time to do so, which is only roughly 13% of the time. Improper recycling methods in China of E-Wastes, let me draw attention to the word improper, has left the ground spiked with toxicity due to higher levels of heavy metals and other chemicals caused by the uncontrolled acid discharge.

China is just one of the many countries who are experiencing damage from our E-Wastes.
When it comes to the production of computing we have other countries in Asia such as the Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Vietnam becoming targets for dumping E-wastes. There has also been targeting in Africa as well, Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, and Ghana are becoming the latest targets for dumping of these wastes generated by more advanced economies with stricter environmental regulations.

E-Wastes contain brominated flame retardants that are used in to print circuit boards,
connectors, covers, and tablets. These are found in high concentrations above improperly ran E-waste recycling sites in China, and areas like it, and can house exceedingly high concentrations of chemicals like polybrominated biphenyls and polybrominated diphenyl. These can be responsible for increased rates of breast, cervical, and uterine cancer in women; as well as, create serious developmental issues for males and females which include sexual, skeletal, and mental developmental issues when they are found in highly concentrated levels.

Computing manufacturing has a negative impact on the environment, the precious materials used to produce our computers, phones, tablets, and other electronic devices alone are very taxing. It has been said that making a computer is as resource intensive as making a refrigerator or a car. For example, the water that is used in computing has to be incredibly sanitized and it takes a lot of it. Microchips have to be cleaned and sanitized with each layer that is etched into them. With some of these crevices being smaller than a wavelength we have to utilize ultra clean water because even the smallest mineral is cumbersome on that chip. This is done with highly clean water, called Ultra Pure
Water (UPW), that is actually not recommend for human consumption because it can strip minerals from the body. It has to be dirtied before being placed back in the water supply, if it is not recycled and reused by the plant.

We are not getting the most from our resources when it comes to computing. There are so many who are uneducated about the boxes under their desks and the devices that run their life. Often times, when an inexperienced user has a simple hard drive failure or something go wrong there are many who just ditch their old system and purchase a brand new one. This pattern stands to why we need to include more technology educational programs in schools. Why we need to see its integration into the core curriculum, and other alternative institutions, so people can be more informed about their greatly needed devices and how to maintain and care for them properly. The internet alone consumes massive amounts of electricity every year. The internet is primarily fueled on the backbone of coal and oil energy and is thus making our most pervasive accessibly knowledge tool since the Gutenberg press a contender for environmental damage.

To put this in further perspective, Greenpeace is estimating that by 2020 our data centers will demand more electricity than is currently demanded by France, Brazil, Canada, and Germany combined. It seems that our thirst for knowledge has led us to create an energy chugging monster of mammoth proportions.

Data centers and the processing of data, which is exponentially skyrocketing alongside our ability to process data, like a Moore’s Law of data generation alongside processor speed will only see this problem compound as more people hop onto the internet and start to use it in their daily lives as technology becomes globalized.

We are at an interesting time in technology and society. We need more professionals in this field to combat the growing need for the development of technological tools and resources. We are at the crossroads of decisions that we can make to transform technology to become more sustainable for our future while teaching people to properly use it, not just slam code on the board and tell them “this works.”  We can use this powerfully encompassing tool to continue achieving a higher quality of life and making it more effective. We can do this through educating younger and current generations about computing, getting them excited about what the future holds with a form of green and sustainable computing in the meld, make them realize what their impact could be by their participation, and teach them the skills necessary to execute their plans for the betterment of computing technology for the future. We have to inform those around us of the production, disposal, and energy consumption dilemmas in computing in order for it to continue to be our most effective tool yet.

Written By: Emily Peed

Article Links:
http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2013/e-waste.aspx
http://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/1037973/Major_Threats_From_EWaste_Current_Generation_And_Impacts.html
http://www.fastcompany.com/1750612/dangerously-clean-water-used-make-your-iphone
http://www.step-initiative.org/index.php/Initiative_WhatIsEwaste.html
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/publications/climate/2011/Cool

Review by Duncan A. Buell

Three years ago, producer/director LeAnn Erickson came out with Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII, a documentary about women mathematicians who held jobs as “computers” during the Second World War. Their primary job at the Philadelphia Computing Section connected to Aberdeen Proving Ground was to compute ballistics tables. The film was well done and has been well received. It tells the story of women who broke the gender barrier doing scientific work in the war years when men were wanted elsewhere.

The Computer Wore Heels is a mobile application telling much the same story but in a different format. The app is book-like, with pages of text, backgrounds that include calculations, mathematics, and photo images, and touch-activated photos, video, and audio. The text is done as if on a manual typewriter, and the format and background are done as if this were sort of a scrapbook, with some annotations done as handwriting.

The story line isn’t linear. It goes back and forth largely as the personal story of women given an opportunity. One waits until halfway through to see the letter to the AAUW from the Dean of the Moore School asking for names of women who would be suitable to work as computers in the ENIAC era, and only because the letter was the same letter as was used for the initial recruitment of women.

Where the film seemed to be largely the personal story of these women pioneers in computing, the app feels much more like the personal stories of women who have professional lives. I found this appealing. Instead of just interviews, one gets from the interspersed documents and backgrounds a good feel for how these women worked with the technology of that era. In many ways, this version of the story improves on the version from the film. Interestingly, I don’t see a single clear photo of a woman wearing high heels.

I have a few complaints. Not all the photos enlarge, and it’s not clear why that could not have been done. At times it does seem to be text-heavy, but there are also places that would seem to cry out for more text. There is a letter from Herman Goldstine offering Doris Blumberg a job as a “Junior Computer” that is a priceless artifact of the terminology of the 1940s. More could have been said, but perhaps not without being dull for the intended audience.

I think The Computer Wore Heels is a great app. My only hesitation is that, if this were to be used for school purposes, the teacher would be well advised to read up on the background. Students will have a hard time today understanding the barriers women faced then to do mathematics and science. In a world that seems constantly engaged in wars that have little impact back home, students may have trouble understanding an entire nation’s mobilizing for the effort of WWII. But the whole story is a large story, and would not have fit in an app in a way that would engage the target audience. The app presents a compelling and inspiring story of women being able to use their intellectual and mathematical talents in an era when that was not common and a story of some of those who were in the thick of things at the dawn of the computer age.