MIMIC PAPER WINS BEST PAPER NATIONAL AWARD
A paper about a nationally-recognized project at Illinois Valley Community College has been named Best Paper Overall at a national conference.
The paper, co-authored by professors Rose Marie Lynch, Dorene Perez and Jim Gibson, describes the Making Industry Meaningful In College (MIMIC) project. The award was presented at the National Association of Industrial Technology Convention Nov. 15 – 18, 2006, in Cleveland, Ohio.
NAIT officials commended the IVCC team for being the first community college instructors to win the award. Of the 290 proposals submitted for the conference, 194 were accepted for conference presentation, 20 papers were selected for publication, and nine were nominated for Best Paper.
Gibson, program director of electronics, accepted the award and presented the paper at the NAIT convention. In 2005, he was named Outstanding Faculty at the NAIT convention.
The MIMIC project places students in engineering design, electronics and business into teams to design, produce, market and sell products. As a result of a $230,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the two-year engineering design and electronics programs are being built around the project.
Perez, the program director of the computer aided design and computer aided engineering program, is the Principal Investigator of the NSF grant. Lynch, a communications instructor, and Gibson are Co-Principal Investigators for the grant.
An earlier paper about MIMIC, also co-authored by the three professors, was nominated for a Best Paper Award at the American Association for Engineering Education National Conference held in Chicago in June 2006.
The MIMIC project has been featured at several national and international conferences including the ASEE International Conference in Beijing, China in 2004.
MIMIC was created 11 years ago by Perez and accounting instructor Alice Steljes, now retired from IVCC; Susan Koepke supervises the business students in the project. MIMIC is sponsored by IVCCs Tech Prep Team and has been supported by a Carl Perkins grant.
October 2006