Navigate -this project aims to significantly help broaden the outreach and visibility of the advanced technological education (ATE) community and program

The National Science Foundation awarded a $601,075 Project Grant on March 1, 2024 to Hillsborough Community College, a federally designated Hispanic Serving Institution, for the NAVIGATE project. This project aims to significantly expand the outreach and visibility of the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program by disseminating the ATE Impacts book and other relevant materials to showcase the cumulative impact of ATE projects and centers. The goal is to help establish a long-standing brand and raise national and regional visibility for the ATE program, which provides funding to support education and training of technicians in advanced technology fields. The project will increase awareness of ATE resources, foster collaborative activities, enhance decision-maker knowledge of the ATE program, and facilitate networking and partnerships. The project is funded under the NSF's STEM Education program, which supports initiatives to improve STEM learning and teaching nationwide.

The ATE impacts book will be disseminated along with other relevant ATE documents to showcase the cumulative impact of ATE projects and centers and to help educators, decision makers, students, industry partners, and other key stakeholders learn more about the valuable work being done through ATE funding. While individual projects and centers may reach out to their own audiences, the goal of the project, navigate, is to help establish a long-standing brand and raise visibility for the ATE program at a national and regional level. ATE centers and projects have limited budgets and staff to share their materials and navigate will significantly broaden their reach and help support their dissemination efforts. The project will improve the skills and knowledge of technicians and technical educators by (1) increasing awareness of the abundant resources available from NSF ATE grantees; (2) foster collaborative activities among centers and projects to reach more individual educators and students, community colleges, and employers; (3) enhance decision makers, staff and faculty knowledge of the NSF ATE program; and (4) facilitate networking and partnerships between educators, industry, other stakeholders and those within and beyond the ATE community. The navigate project will focus on providing opportunities for interaction and collaboration in conjunction with mentoring projects, high-quality materials, and resources to support and enhance rigor, relevance, and cross-curriculum content knowledge, technical skills, abilities and pedagogy in advanced technology fields. This project is funded by the advanced technological education program that focuses on the education of technicians for the advanced-technology fields that drive the nation's economy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.- subawards are not planned for this award.