Program Overview
With “technology program” registration in post-secondary school at record lows, it is clear that students are not pursuing careers in technology. This is going to have a huge economic impact on Canada’s technology sector. In the Ottawa region the current workforce has the highest percentage of university graduates in the country, and the highest concentration of PhDs in North America, tied with Boston. With 90 per cent of Canada’s industrial telecommunications research and development conducted here, we need to ensure that we have the talent to sustain this. If Ottawa is to sustain its position as an innovation and technology leader, it is critical that it invests now, in its talent pipeline.
In 2007, OCRI and the Ottawa Software Cluster partnered with the Earl of March High School to run a series of industry-led activities aimed at discovering why students are not choosing technology careers. A number of initiatives were executed and based on student feedback it was clearly identified that it was the industry-led interaction that had the greatest impact on increasing students' interest in pursuing post-secondary technology careers. It is with this in mind that the Ottawa High School Technology Program pilot was developed.
The entire project is designed around social computing, the open source community and around the XO laptop. The core of the program is for students to create, with the help of industry experts, a final project that will run on the XO. Students will also have the chance to touch, use, and take apart world leading technology with the guidance of the technology professionals who built and designed it. The students participate in the program one day a week, allowing industry the opportunity to participate with as little impact in their regular work schedule as possible. The students are given laptops to use throughout the program allowing them to easily move between the different technology companies and to work on their projects while at school.
The pilot will start on September 30, 2008 and run for two sessions, the fall and winter terms of the academic year. Grade 11 students from All Saints High School will participate in the fall session and grade 10 students from the Earl of March High School in the winter term. The program includes; taking apart PC's, laptops, and BlackBerry's (led by industry experts); site visits to key labs/ facilities at post-secondary institutions; attending a clean technology talent conference; a networking day at Nortel; a site visit to Plasco Energy; and finally with the help of industry software engineers, the creation of a program for the XO computer (one laptop per child). Students will create the final project using SCRATCH or Java and the final programs will be presented and judged at an end- of -year celebration.