Inspire high school students’ career aspirations and goals

Do you enjoy your career and find real value in the work you do? Do you feel that your ICT skills play a key part in your current and future success? If so, perhaps you would be interested in giving a career talk to high school students, providing inspiration about your job and the many other opportunities available in ICT-related careers.

As a member of the Canadian Coalition for Tomorrow’s ICT Skills (CCICT), we are helping recruit role models to visit schools in the Toronto area for CCICT’s CareerMashup initiative. Planned for the last two weeks of October, CareerMashup is a week-long festival of events and activities raising awareness about today’s interesting and varied ICT-related careers.

We are also looking for individuals willing to talk about their careers for video profiles on CareerMash, a new online career network developed by the CCICT.

Why your help is needed

Employing more than one million Canadians, ICT activities are the foundation of our knowledge economy. More Canadians work in ICT than in agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, oil and gas, utilities and auto-manufacturing combined. The demand for employees with specialized ICT-related skills continues to grow. Despite this, there is an alarming decline in ICT-related post-secondary enrolments.

Research has shown that when considering careers and post-secondary options, many high school students are unaware of the exciting new jobs and opportunities out there. If they think of these jobs at all, they think of them as desk-bound and boring. As you are well aware, this is not the case.

An industry-led coalition, CCICT was formed to address this urgent issue and help reverse the trend.

Training provided

The role model training will take place on Tuesday, September 13^th. CCICT will manage all of the logistics, provide training and assist with presentation content. If you are interested in being a role model and/or participating in a video profile, please contact me.

CCICT is looking for many different role models, but especially entrepreneurial types and those in a wide variety of specialized fields like digital media, health informatics, product innovation, medical research, green infrastructure, mobile technologies and applications etc. Here is a list of characteristics (keeping in mind these are just loose guidelines):

- lively, engaging personalities
- comfortable speaking to groups
- diverse range of ethnic backgrounds
- strong female representation
- wide range of industries with an emphasis on ICT, finance, business, environment, health and wellness, media, manufacturing, arts and culture, and transportation
- wide range of career types from those working in large organizations to entrepreneurs and the self-employed

In addition to organizing the school visits, CCICT will provide each role model with training and help preparing their presentation. We are looking for role models who will commit to visiting at least one school (for 1/2 to a whole day) in October, and who will come to a training session on September 13th in Toronto.

Cleaning house part 3

Some of the external experiments that used the PC or Apple i/o cards were found during clean up. Above is a stepper motor driver controlled directly from an Apple II i/o card.
This is a temperature probe that uses op-amps and an A to D converter for rather accurate T measurements. The probe is a 2n2222 epoxied into the end of a pen barrel.
.... not sure but lots of familiar parts!
Digital dice made using wire wrap technology.
A binary number game. The black header holds a 7 segment display driven by a random number generator. The student would set the DIP switches to make the same number in binary and push the button. The circuit will indicate Too High, Correct or Too Low.

These circuits are now trash but the memory of making and using them in classes remains.
Sniff :(

Cleaning house part 2

This hand made PC ISA slot interface card used the 8255 chip to provide three 8 bit digital i/o ports. The DIP switch is part of setting the address of the card. A 25 pin (D sub) cable connected the card to an experimenter card made using the same wire wrap technology as the interface card.
These experimenter boards gave the students 8 LEDs, a 7 segment display, 8 DIP switches mounted on the white header and access to 8 i/o pins via the terminal strip to connect external circuits and experiments.


Part 3 shows some interface circuits and other random circuits made in the 90s.

Cleaning house part 1

We're cleaning up our classrooms in preparation of a move to a new building with more limited space. I came across these old computer interface circuits we used to employ when I taught electronics back in the 90s.

These first two photos show one of the Apple II interface cards we used. These were made using wire-wrap technology. Each card provided two 8 bit digital i/o ports labelled A and B. We would use a ribbon cable like this:
.... to connect to a hand made experimenter board like this.
Here students could control the LEDs or read the position of DIP switches mounted on the white header.
In part 2 I'll look at the next generation . . . PC interface cards.

Possible return of the OOPic

One of the main themes in this blog is looking at available microcontrollers since the demise of the OOPic chip. My students and I have had some fun learning about the Arduino and the Parallax Stamp. Both devices have lots going for them but I missed the true object oriented nature of the OOPic. The IDE was able to portray these objects graphically and display the object properties in real time. I still use a number of OOPic controlled robots in my classroom. Some of the electronics is starting to fail. Perhaps this new Raptor will be available in time to replace the old boards.

Analog to Digital

Some grade 12s are working with the 2 BASIC Stamp modules I have in my class. The 3rd group is working with an Arduino Duo. Both groups are experimenting with Analog to Digital conversion. The Ardiuno Examples-Analog lab made a good start. Adding my DSO Nano oscilloscope meant they could see exactly what PWM means and why the LED could be dimmed from 0 to 100%. On the Stamp the other groups were using an RC circuit to measure the value of a variable resistor. The Stamp even has a built in in RCTIME function to pull this off. This RC time method works well but I started looking for the analog inputs and discovered the Stamp has none! Christopher Vecchio's web page shows a good work-around for the Stamp.
Arduino Analog Inputs - 6
Stamp Analog Inputs - 0
Score one for Arduino!

Computer Engineering ABQ - First Day

This evening was day 1 of the OISE Computer Engineering ABQ course taught at EC Drury High School. I was energized to meet the talented and caring teachers taking this "First Ever" ABQ in this subject. As I suspected, the key theme will be sharing as we all come from diverse industry backgrounds and various teaching experiences. I will certainly hand off the teaching to those better qualified and will need to act as a coordinator as everyone follows their own path to becoming qualified. I think the class wiki will be fun and an interesting platform for sharing and delivering course materials. I look forward to reading everyones blog posts in the next few days and discovering their perspectives on day 1.

What's an ABQ? This is an Additional Basic Qualification course offered by the University of Toronto Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). An ABQ qualifies a teacher to teach a particular subject at a particular level.