NAF Academy
NAF Engineering Academy
NAF Academies Mission Statement:
The Burbank Unified School District NAF Academy will provide an academic and technology based program that inspires students to become respectful and successful members of a continually evolving global community. Through high quality instruction, community service, shadowing experiences, and internships students will graduate with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, the workplace, and the world beyond.
Academy Development & Structure
NAF academies are structured as small, focused learning communities that fit within and enhance high school systems, allowing NAF to become an integral part of a plan for higher achievement at low cost. NAF promotes open enrollment for its academies in order to maximize every student’s chance at a successful future. The flexible structure encourages teacher collaboration across subject areas and fosters personalization to meet student, school, district, and state needs and goals.
Curriculum & Instruction
NAF provides a rigorous, industry-validated career-themed curriculum that incorporates current industry standards and practices, literacy strategies, and STEM integration. NAF’s instructional practices foster cross-curriculum collaboration so students can make connections across subject areas. The NAF curricula is created in partnership with industry professionals and designed around projects that help students acquire valuable workplace skills and see their education as a step toward long-term career options. NAF empowers teachers to expand the boundaries of the classroom in non-traditional ways that ensure lessons have real-world application to growing industries.
Industry & Advisory Boards
NAF advisory boards provide an essential bridge between schools and the workplace. Business people and community leaders volunteer on local advisory boards to play an active role in developing their future workforce by shaping talent in high school. Advisory board members collaborate with educators to inform curricula and help organize work-based learning activities. Advisory boards give students the opportunity to build relationships with mentors early and learn from successful adults.
Work-Based Learning
Work-based learning brings the classroom to the workplace and the workplace to the classroom. This instructional strategy provides students with a well-rounded skill set that goes beyond academics and includes the soft skills needed to succeed in college and the working world. NAF’s approach to work-based learning is centered on a continuum of work-based learning experiences beginning with career awareness activities, progressing to career exploration activities, and culminating in career preparation activities, including internships. Business people guest speak in classrooms, host college and career skills workshops, and take part in mock interviews. Students have the opportunity to tour work sites, network with, and shadow business professionals. Work-based learning culminates in an internship that allows students to apply their classroom skills and learn more about what it takes to succeed.
Engineering Academy
The NAF Engineering academy is a program to get students excited to work in STEM. Teaching the ins and outs of what engineering truly is and what the future holds in this career path. Everything from planing, design, building, and the professional side of engineering is all included in these courses.
Engineering 1
This STEM course is a basic introduction to engineering for all students. Students who complete this course will learn the concepts necessary in order to develop their ideas into solutions that will improve our lives. Exciting hands-on learning activities like data comparison of heart rates, rating consumer products, destructive testing and building speakers apply math, science, history and English content from other courses in a STEM experience. This course makes science and mathematics more engaging, interesting, concrete, and relevant. The course’s intention and purpose is to educate students in a “main line” method providing STEM education for everyone. While providing a STEM based education for all students, those interested in becoming practicing engineers clearly benefit from this course content.
I got real hands-on experience for the first time through this course. Working with wood, metal, and electronics, I picked up a good amount of skills in project building. The picture to the left also shows a project made while in the class.
Intro to Computer Science
Intro to Computer Science is a year long hands-on class that explores computer science concepts of computer terminology and architecture, software, the Internet and web design, and Java programming. The major focus of the course involves an extensive academic study of computer science concepts using the Java programming language. Topics included here are console input and output, programming calculations and operator precedence, predefined Java Math methods, control statements (if-else, for, while) and object-oriented programming. Students who successfully complete this class have been well prepared to take AP Computer Science A the following year.
Throughout taking the course, I learned what it really meant to code. I continued with computer science to my senior year where I have become proficient in Java by learning various data structures like the one shown to the left, and also learning different languages like C++ this year to have a wide range of coding knowledge.
AP Physics
This physics course is a qualitative and quantitative study of the central concepts of physics including mechanics, thermodynamics, waves, sound, light, electricity and magnetism, and modern physics. Emphasis will be placed on mental imagery that relates to things and events that are familiar in the everyday environment. Physics concepts 65 will be studied with the use of demonstrations, laboratory investigations, multimedia presentations, and student projects. Laboratory work will include some computation.
Everything is related to physics, so a basic understanding of it is fundamental to all engineering purposes. Learning complex mechanisms and how they work cant be done without looking at the physics of the situation. Various equations like those to the left are just simple applications of the vast world of physics.
Engineering 2
This advanced engineering STEM course makes a contribution to the curriculum by providing opportunities for students and teachers to link content together and apply it to solve problems. More and more jobs demand advanced skills, requiring that people be able to learn, reason, think creatively, make decisions, and solve problems. An understanding of science, technology, engineering and math and their methods contribute in an essential way to these skills. Principles of Engineering is a team based advanced course designed for most students. The Principles of Engineering courses intention and purpose is to educate students in a “main line” method providing STEM education for everyone. While providing a STEM based education for all students, those interested in becoming practicing engineers clearly benefit from this course content.
More complex topics such as CAD modeling and design are fundamentals to engineering as well. Designing solutions to everyday problems and even being able to see your idea printed with 3D printers, frequently used in class, are available to all. Even a baseline of robotics such as creating circuits using Arduino and coding them to create in-class hands-on projects get people not only excited for engineering but excited about their future in engineering as well.
NAFTrack Certification
I have completed all the courses listed above as well as some other courses which apply to NAF such as AP Computer Science A and H Computer Science AB. I have also completed an 80 hour paid internship and when I am fully approved for my internship and portfolio I will be 100% complete with my NAF Certification. I plan to graduate NAF Certified with stole, May 2022.