The Environmental and Spatial Technology (EAST) program at Northeast Technology Center’s Claremore Campus recently received the 2012 EAST Founder’s Award of Excellence for Sophistication and Innovation. The program received the award last month at the national EAST conference in Hot Springs, AR. This award is given to the EAST program who best demonstrated the ability to use the advanced-level tools and vast resources available in the classroom to find needs within the community and use those tools to solve the community problems. As part of the prize for the award, NTC Claremore’s EAST program received equipment for their classroom. The EAST program is finishing its third year at the NTC Claremore Campus. The focus of the program is on student-driven service projects accomplished by using teamwork and cutting-edge technology. EAST classrooms are equipped with state-of-the-art workstations, servers, software and accessories, including GPS / GIS mapping tools, architectural and CAD design software, 3D animation suites, virtual reality development and more. Students identify problems in their local communities and then use these tools to develop solutions, collaborating with civic and other groups in the process. The focus, however, is not on the technology itself, but on the unique learning environment of the EAST classroom, where students are responsible for creating their own project-based learning experience. There are no lectures and no tests. Instead, the students are guided by an EAST facilitator (a teacher trained in the EAST process). This radically different approach to learning yields tremendous results. Students are better-prepared for both college and the business world, and they care more about learning and serving their communities. The project that the EAST program focused on for the Founder’s award was their partnership with the Claremore Museum of History. The EAST class has been collaborating with the Historical Society for the past year-and-a-half, helping them acquire the building, create exhibits, and produce marketing items. EAST’s major contribution has been their idea to add a technology focus to the museum. EAST collaborated with an internet start-up company based in Tulsa called Yapanda. Yapanda is allowing EAST students to learn their technology and create avatars to guide visitors through the museum. When a visitor enters the museum they will be given a tablet computer that will have Yapanda’s software available. Through the use of RFID technology, visitors will scan a bar code and information about the current exhibit will appear on the tablet. This information can appear in several different forms: pictures, videos, 3D images, or digital yearbooks. This gives the museum more flexibility to display more information about an exhibit. This reduces physical space and square footage requirements, which reduces the museum’s overhead expenses. With the tablet technology, the Historical Society can gather large amounts of information about an exhibit and allow visitors the flexibility to learn more about things that interest them the most. The use of the tablet technology is also intended to attract a wider age range to the museum and create word of mouth buzz about the museum. The museum is expected to open during the fall of this year in the old Library located in gazebo park downtown. The historical society is currently raising money for the renovations needed to prepare the Library for the museum. For more information on the EAST program at Northeast Technology Center’s Claremore campus, please call (918) 342-8066 or visit www.netech.edu.