Corridor In The News

High-tech jobs need early start

Science, math key for careers in technology, students told

Jennai Hagen, 11, raises her finger to feel the vibrations in a string during a hands-on demonstration on wave lengths during a discussion on math and physics by Dr. Jeffrey Bindell to sixth grade students from Sebring Middle School. The techPATH program aims to inspire young students to pursue careers in science and technology.

By JOE SEELIG
Highlands Today

Published: January 25, 2011
Updated: 01/25/2011 05:52 pm

SEBRING - Tomorrow's good paying technological jobs will require vast amounts of study, good grades and the ability to absorb information. This often means choosing a particular career path early.

Close to 30 students from Sebring Middle School Tuesday attended a Math and Physics Day workshop at South Florida Community College.

The Florida High Tech Corridor Council's workforce initiative called techPATH organized it.

The Florida High Tech Corridor is equally funded through the University of Central Florida, the University of South Florida and the University of Florida.

Jeffrey Bindell, who works in the physics department at UCF half of the time and also with techPATH, encourages young students to pursue a career early.

"If you want to work for a living, you can blow off science and math and you can blow off your studies, and you can go off flipping burgers," he told the students. "On the other hand, if you don't want to work for a living and have fun for a living, high-tech careers are a way to have fun. Stay in science if you like it, or medicine and you'll make decent money and you'll enjoy it."

If sixth-graders blow off the math and science, when they reach high school and decide they want to be an engineer or pursue some other a technical career, it's too late, he said.

"It's incredible how much knowledge they're going to have to accumulate at the start, early," he said. "The schools are trying to do that."

The teachers are doing a great job with the limited funding they have, he said.

"So, if you want to improve this country, fund education!" he said.

Technology is moving so quickly "they can't wait until college to decide," said Dorothea Strickland, district K-12 science specialist. "High school kids are taking college classes."

Bindell and Ahlam Al-Rawi, also with UCF, showed the class a variety of science experiments with gasses and inertia. They also experimented with magnets and electricity and tied it into four mathematical formulas that described everything they just did.

"Look at them," said Rebecca Fleck, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction with the Highlands County School system, during the demonstration. "They're just riveted."

Student Josue Villalobos said he most liked an experiment in momentum when Bindell put a liquid in a plastic bottle, shook it up, made a vapor, then lit the end, launching it across the room.

The students were then split into groups and led to simulation stations in the nursing class, and shuttled to the Emergency Medical Services training simulation and law enforcement training at the Public Service Academy.

They learned a little about each field and how technology plays a role there.
"Technology allows us to make a simulation that looks like a baby," Steve Ashworth, EMS Academy program director, told the students standing over a mannequin that could cry, breathe and had a heart beat.

"We can mess up on these (the simulation) as much as we want but we don't want to mess up on one of these," he said, tapping a student on the shoulder.

Villalobos said he still didn't know what he wants to be when he grows up, but he did like the nursing school demonstration, which was the first he had seen.

In there the students were shown the wrong and right way to keep a hospital room; how to correctly administer intravenous medication; taking blood samples and an interactive demonstration.

Straight-A student Jennai Hagen, 11, said she studies very hard. She didn't know yet if she wanted to enter one of these high-tech fields.

"I haven't really put much thought to it," she said, but she liked the mannequins and the technology in the physics and math portion of the presentation.

"You get to do a lot of things as a nurse," she said.

Highlands Today reporter Joe Seelig can be reached at (863) 386-5834 or jseelig@highlandstoday.com.