Next Generation Manufacturing

Educators: Externships

Externship Summary - 2006

RCNGM Leader: Fred D'Angelo, Manufacturing Technology
Manchester Community College

Externship: Gerber Technologies

Lessons Learned:

That many of the theoretical concepts I present to my students in the in operating systems course have actual practical applications. Prior to this experience at Gerber, I had only read about this area. Never had I actually worked with it.

Getting a grasp of the timing of events in an interrupt based system. The same program on which I worked functioned as a simple operating system. It would perform a series of tasks while waiting for an event to occur. When an event which it was programmed to detect occurred, it would put what it was doing aside and turn its attention to that event by executing code related to the event. When it finished handling the event, it resumed working on its previous task. Understanding this in theory is quite easy; making this happen in a program is much more difficult.

Impact on Student Learning

I hoped that my experience from this externship would give me a sounder basis from which to present operating systems topics and make my discussions of them more real and less â€œtextbookish.â€� From my perspective this was achieved. However, the students did not react as positively as I would have liked. I expected that they would have found this presentation interesting and that it would have stimulated their curiosity and interest in this subject, but it did not.

Externship Sustainability

I have distributed material â€“ slide presentations and examples â€“ to other faculty members. I have told other faculty members about this program and discussed my experiences in it with them. I try to convey how externships have benefited me.

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Educators: Externships

Externship Summary - 2006