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Andrew Morris, an advanced technical drafting student, teaches masonry instructor Robert Phipps how to create a motor support using Inventor software.

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Celebrating technical skills

Stafford High celebrates Career and Technical Education Month

Date published: 3/6/2007

In celebration of Career & Technical Education month in Virginia, Stafford High School's advanced drafting students assumed the role of their teacher for a day. The faculty and the drafting students' family members were invited to be the students.

The second-, third- and fourth-year drafting students first learned how to develop a lesson plan from their teacher, Bobby Jett. They devised lesson plans and instructional strategies for teaching mechanical and architectural computer-aided design software to adult students with little or no experience in CAD, architecture or mechanics.

The drafting students' objective was to teach their adult students how to create and print a working drawing of a floor plan or a mechanical part. Fourth-year student Andrew Spencer designed a problem for the adult students to create as instructed by the drafting students.

Twenty-four adult students--16 faculty and eight family members--participated in the "hands-on" sessions. They learned to use Autodesk Inventor or Architectural Desktop design software under the guidance of 16 drafting students. Each adult student successfully created and printed their assigned project.

Several of the teachers proudly displayed their projects in their classrooms and told their students about their day as a drafting student.

The final activity was an evaluation by the drafting students of their day as a teacher. Grace Williams and Sean House remarked that they unexpectedly learned something about the software from the faculty members they were teaching.

All of them agreed that the most challenging task was teaching when to left-click, right-click and use the scroll wheel on the mouse. They also recognized that they were not just teaching the soft- ware but also the subject. They could not explain a command in Architectur- al Desktop without explaining the architectural concept behind the command.

Finally, every student-teacher agreed that teaching was much more challenging and rewarding than they expected.



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Date published: 3/6/2007


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