“Dear Mrs. Britton, It is my pleasure to inform you that members of your Technology Education Department (Bryan Amenta, Dan Grenier, and Luke Arsenault) have been selected as the 2011 Connecticut Technology Education Program of the Year."

So begins the letter Barbara Britton, principal at Hand, received several weeks ago from the president of the Connecticut Technology Education Association (CTEA). As the 2011 Program of the Year, Hand will be honored in June at the CTEA state conference and next month in Minneapolis at the International Technology Education and Engineering Association (ITEEA) annual conference. The ITEEA award is one of the highest honors given to technology and engineering classroom teachers.

The award and these honors come as no surprise to Patricia Drew, Hand's coordinator for Career and Technical Education (CTE). She has seen the department change and grow across the last several years.

"Today's 'shop classes,' as they used to be thought of, include 18 courses ranging from construction systems to the field of engineering to robotics to power and energy to television production," Drew said.

Enrollment in the classes continues to increase-418 students this year-and 17.5 percent of those are female.

"All of our technical education courses offer students the opportunity to innovate and problem solve through the application of technology, engineering, and design," Drew said. "Those are 21st century skills."

Problem-solving and design have become the main focus for courses such as power and energy, foundations of engineering, materials processing, engineering design, architectural design, and construction systems. If those sound a bit too technical, Hand's technology educators offer a few surprises that also require problem-solving, innovative thinking, and design skills. There is the combined technology and marine science course in which last year's class built a boat for the Shellfish Commission. There is a television and video production area with classrooms and video-editing labs. There is a construction systems program that includes theater set design.

And then students get to build a robot, too. Drew says two years ago the program received a $10,000 grant to implement a robotics program and it has "just taken off."

Grenier explained, "We started two years ago with very basic robotics kits, but we found so much interest we moved on to VEX robots, which are more sophisticated systems. These don't look like what we usually think of as a robot. They look more like the old-fashioned erector sets. The students are building them and adding the design and software to navigate an obstacle course."

Hand's robotics team has been to several "scrimmages" across the state this year, including one this week, and then it hopes to head to the state championship competition at Central Connecticut State University in April.

Hand now has an active and growing technology student association.

"On any given day, you can walk into our classrooms and our labs after school and see students working. They are working on the robot or sitting at the computer creating drawings with the CAD [computer-aided design] system or in the television studio filming. It's exciting to see," Drew said.

"When we introduced the engineering component, students flocked to it," Grenier said. "Students want to be stimulated and our objective is to get them involved right away. We emphasize real-life applications and because of that, we attract a variety of students from athletes to artists to computer geeks."

Drew added, "The traditional model of the auto shop and a woodworking class are gone. Today technical programs in high schools offer courses such as introduction to television, engineering, marine sciences, [and] architectural design. We are striving to create the learning experiences and skills that students will find useful today or 10 years from now or further into the future. This entire field has changed and we have worked hard to keep up with it and with our students."

Grenier spoke about the excitement that grows with each robotics scrimmage, the video recently produced by students in the television course, and the five females in his Introduction to Computer Aided Design course.

"A couple of years ago I would have been lucky to see one, even though it is such a great field for females," Grenier said. "Yeah, take all this together, we're doing the right thing here."

The "right thing" has just been named the 2011 Technology Education Program of the Year for Connecticut.