TVET Week:Young innovators arrive on the horizon

Several innovative inventions and designs by students were showcased on Monday on the Applied Technology High School (ATHS) and the Secondary Technical School (STS) campus in Mohammed bin Zayed City in an open day event aimed at attracting young people into vocational education.

Wearing a glove with sensors in his right hand, Abdul Aziz Al Baloushi, an engineering science student at ATHS, demonstrated how this helps enable a mute person speak by flexing his hands.

“How are you?” came out from the speaker system attached to a laptop and the sensor board.

“It uses a flexible resistance sensor,” explained Abdul Aziz who noted that messages are relayed depending on how one bends the gloved fingers. Different moves produce other statements like ‘My name is Mohammed’ and ‘It is my pleasure to meet you’.

“This is just a prototype, we have also done a wireless,” Abdul Aziz said. According to the 18-year-old, his trip to NASA when he was in Grade 9 and seeing how rockets work have excited him to wanting to become a mechanical engineer.

On the next booth, Ahmed Abdulla Alameri, Grade 11 engineering student from STS, was showing off the welding simulation. “This is what we use before using the real live one, because the real one is dangerous. We practice on this welding simulation in Grade 10 and then we start using the real one at Grade 11 and 12,” he explained.

In the same booth, Majid Khalfan, Grade 11 students at STS demonstrated their very own drilling machine.

“Every piece of this machine was made in the school. This is made from metal and there are 20 volts inside. It took us three months of planning, putting it together and assembly. This is just a sample, we also have a digital one but we cannot bring it,” Majid said.

Ahmed Abdulla Alameri showing his welding simulator.

In another booth, Ahmed Suleiman Alreyami, an engineering science student at ATHS, was demonstrating how the aquaponic system is used in growing plants, fish breeding and water recycling all at once. “There are two motors below, one moves the water around so fish waste (plant food) doesn’t stay in one place while the other one pumps the water up from the fish tank to the plants,” he said.

Describing the cleaning process, the Grade 12 student said that the hydrostones act as filters that absorbs the waste from the water and releases clean water back to the fist tank. “Waste stays in here, no need to change at all so water is not wasted,” he pointed out.

At the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) week, hosted by the Abu Dhabi Centre for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (Actvet), similar mini-expos and other activities, such as workshops and seminars, will be carried out till Thursday at different TVET campuses across the UAE.

Benefits and advances in TVET will be in focus this week. It will also engage students, parents and the community on various career opportunities available in the field, as well as, update employers on the technical developments in the education system.

“It is a good opportunity for our students, parents, community and industry partners to share and ideas and exchange experiences on the importance of TVET in UAE and also to talk about the future job opportunities in UAE in this sector,” said Mubarak Saeed Al Shamsi, director general of Actvet.

“Across the world vocational and technical education is becoming an increasing focus of governments … all governments are investing heavily in technical education, because they realise the economic prosperity of the future is absolutely in the hands of technical education,” said Dr William Radford, director of strategic planning and performance at Actvet.

Students that attended the open-day event on Monday have taken advantage of the presence of industry participants like Adnoc to learn more about career and scholarship opportunities with them.

“I would like to take a scholarship from Adnoc and go to West Virginia University to study mechanical engineering,” said Ahmad Ali, Grade 11 student from STS.

Abdulla Awad, also from STS, said he is also interested to work with Adnoc in future in the meantime, his interest lies in getting hands-on experience at his school’s workshop.

Ahmed Araf said the main reason he went to STS is to improve his English language skills. “Here classes are done in English not in Arabic,” he said.

Abdulla noted that leaving the government school and joining STS at Grade 9 was the best decision he made. “When I came here, we had four to five periods in English, they put more emphasis on English as they are preparing us for the IELTS exam,” he explained.

olivia@khaleejtimes.com