Board # 2 : Digital Technology Education Collaborative: Report on NSF-ATE project on Reconfigurable Electronics Workforce Development

The electronics world is undergoing a transformation in the underlying technologies used to create new products for the world’s consumers. The movement to reconfigurable digital systems using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and microcontrollers is sweeping the electronics world in the rush to create smaller, faster, and more flexible consumer and industrial devices. The Community College has put together a team of educational partners spanning the country with the background and skills necessary to create a vibrant virtual center. Team members include colleges and universities with a history of reaching out to minority and underserved student populations. Partners on this project have years of successful National Science Foundation project implementations educating and training hundreds of instructors and introducing thousands of students to advanced technologies. The goal of this project is to offer an unprecedented opportunity to bring America’s technicians directly to this cutting edge of reconfigurable electronics technology. This project will substantially update digital logic courses by providing the tools and curricular materials needed to replace the now outdated materials most commonly used. The updated curriculum will greatly enhance competitiveness for community college graduates seeking to enter the job market or undergraduate engineering programs. Secondly, the project will provide colleges with educational equipment up-to-date with current technological solutions. Most importantly, the project will bring new excitement to education by introducing reconfigurable electronics with a new world of possibilities for student projects, such as robot competitions, video game design, embedded systems and more. Finally, the project will develop industry, K-12 and university partnerships to facilitate pathways to careers in the exciting field of reconfigurable electronics for first-generation, minority and other under-served populations, including veterans. The paper will address the comprehensive three-year project activities including the Faculty Professional Development workshop on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and ARMbased microcontrollers, assessment results and lessons learned, the summer outreach activity happened at partner institutions, and finally, promoting the employment of reconfigurable electronics graduates.