In late 2009, two Canton City Schools Project Lead the Way students, Seth Jones and Eric Armstead, along with their teacher,  William Small (IED Master Teacher) and Assistant Principal Chris Stone, traveled to Austin, Texas to represent Timken Senior High School at the PLTW National Symposium.

Timken’s PLTW program was selected as one of twenty five programs nationwide to represent their states at this national conference

The primary display focused on the Illuminarts project.  This was a local opportunity for students to showcase their design of a project which they selected -- an interactive museum experience for students as a portion of their Civil Engineering and Architecture coursework.  They titled their museum the “Career Exploratorium”.  For this facility, the students collaborated as an entire class and designed a series of rooms within the facility that would expose users to a variety of career fields and the nature of work they might encounter within that career field.

The end product included six 30” x 42” display boards which depict elements of the design process which the students went through while designing this facility as well as images of the final design, a relatively small scale “massing” model (approx. 13” W x 12” D x 3” H), and an elementary animated “walkthrough” of the building.

Additionally, the students took along some descriptive brochures and some information in video format (played on portable DVD players) dealing with other aspects of the PLTW programs as they interface with such activities as U.S. FIRST robotics and a “Non-Traditional Day” which is geared to exposing female middle school students to various Career and Technical field opportunities which they might not consider as viable educational options for females.