A pipeline for young techies

FIFTY-EIGHT OUTSTANDING STUDENTS FROM ACROSS Georgia's Rockdale County are pioneers in an unprecedented partnership between a local public school and nearby Georgia Tech University that provides world-class high tech training in high school.

The Rockdale Magnet School for Science and Technology, envisioned by the Rockdale County Board of Education in 1998, enables students drawn from six schools across the county outside Atlanta to take part in a custom-made, four-year high-tech curriculum while fulfilling traditional requirements for graduation.

Underway since August, the program has on loan professors in engineering and computer science from Georgia Tech to develop research courses that bring physical sciences and mathematics theory down to earth for young students in projects focusing on telecommunications and information technology. County officials hope it will help satisfy the state's voracious appetite for high-tech graduates. The number of high-tech enterprises in Georgia has more than doubled since 1990 and the number of engineering jobs is expected to double over the next ten years.

The high school-university-corporate partnership advances Georgia's Yamacraw Mission a state-wide economic development crusade to increase the number of graduates prepared for the electronic design and telecommunications fields. That is important because Georgia has the fastest population growth of any state east of the Rocky Mountains, and by 2005, the population is expected to hit 8.2 million.

The county school board and Rockdale County's forward looking Chamber of Commerce, which helped spearhead the program, enlisted the support of technology-dependent firms such as Lithonia Lighting and AT&T to craft research projects and classroom curriculum that prepare seniors for real-world internships in the students final year of high school. The two firms and Georgia Tech are providing money, advice, facilities and internships.

Dean Afford, head of Allied Utility Network and vice chair of Partners for Tomorrow, the economic development effort for Rockdale County, says inspiration for the program came from seeing a magnet high school located in a high tech industrial park in Metz, France last spring. "For the first time it seemed to click,'" said Afford, who returned to Georgia to help mobilize the effort.

The goal of the program is to make sure that students are "fully engaged in personal research" during their years in high school so that by their senior year they will be shadowing a high-tech job at a local enterprise during one class period each day.

In the first year, 40 freshmen and 18 sophomores met the tough requirements for admission. Of the 81 students who applied for the program, 58 were admitted and all 58 accepted, including 23 girls and 35 boys-seven of whom are from racial or ethnic minorities. Students in the program often carry a heavier load than others, with some days starting with a tutorial at 7:30 a.m. and going until dinnertime to include extracurricular activities like band or sports.

Of the seven classes students take each day, three of the courses are part of the magnet program math, research and science. Students' first research project, due for completion by March, will be drawn from microbiology, physics, pure math research, engineering, computer science or consumer health-medicine. Two students have expressed interest in carrying out research on weather and bugs- meteorology and entomology.

In addition to the research-oriented courses offered by the program, students also can enroll in advanced placement courses in mathematics, including calculus, computer science and statistics, and the sciences, including biology, chemistry and physics. Some students can take part in special experiments underway at Georgia Tech.

April Brown, the associate dean of Georgia Tech's College of Engineering, says the partnership helps teachers design experiments for students "that couple the course fundamentals with telecommunications and technology."

"We have not created this program to serve as a direct pipeline to Georgia Tech," Brown says. "But we are preparing good students if they do choose to go to Georgia Tech."

Linda Creighton is a freelance writer living in suburban Washington, D.C.

Copyright American Society for Engineering Education Dec 2000
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