Student Poster Session at HI-TEC

Every year, the National Convergence Technology Center sponsors some of the top students from the Convergence College Network (CCN) community to participate in a Poster Session at the Advance Technological Education’s (ATE) High Impact Exchange Conference (HI-TEC). Each student has to create a poster about a project that they’re working on or researching and present it during the session. As a technical educator conference, the students have an opportunity to showcase their work to IT industry leaders, universities and IT employers. This year we sponsored two students – Amberly Hoffman from Sinclair Community College in Dayton, OH; and Ean Towne from Collin Community College in Frisco, TX. Both students presented their projects during HI-TEC’s poster session which ran three hours, including a high-traffic cocktail reception.

Amberly Hoffman speaks to attendees at this year’s HI-TEC about Sinclair’s Supplemental Instruction.

Amberly shared Sinclair’s new program called Supplemental Instruction – “I’m the supplemental instructor at Sinclair College. Sinclair has been piloting a new program called Supplemental Instruction, which is a learning modality. Itfocuses on collaboration, engagement and instant real-world application concepts. The classes that we choose for this are gatekeeper classes which typically means that they really have a high enrollment, but a low retention rate. We’re looking to support students in these classes by focusing on the course content. We do have other resources for students such as tutoring, but supplemental instruction is a little bit different because it’s group-led activities whereas tutoring focuses on the student and what you need right now. We’re focusing on learning the concept and applying it.”

Ean shared his idea of how to make a mesh network for 802.11ax [Wi-Fi 6], the newest network standard for wireless – “This is a layout of how you could take one single channel and turnit into an entire mesh network. For instance, your entire house, a parking lot at an airport or IoT devices connected to apple trees in an orchard. Without having to run additional wires and building that entire network. You can do it wirelessly with a confined RF spectrum so that you’re not using up the entire spectrum.”

Both students received an overwhelming amount of interest and support during the conference.  In addition, they were able to sit in on several informative IT conference breakout sessions. To read more about this year’s HI-TEC, visit our website .

Ean Towne speaks to attendees at this year’s HI-TEC about Conceptual Design for a Single Channel Wireless Mesh in IEEE 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6).

Ean speaking with Aaron Burciaga of Analytics2Go during the conference.