Welding Engineering, Education and Code Thoughts

When making questions for your quiz bank and questions in general you might decide that you want to include a sketch or a drawing or something like that to maybe give the students a hint or maybe the questions requires a sketch. When teaching welding it is pretty difficult to ask questions about welding symbols and blueprint reading without a small drawing or a sketch.  Now that we realize that at some point you are probably going to need a sketch or two for your class, I am going to list the four main pieces of software that I use to add a little depth and or clarity to my quiz questions. 1) Google Drawings 2) Libre Office - Draw 3) Snipping Tool - on Windows 10 4) Microsoft Paint - on Windows 10 All of the above pieces of software are either free or open source.  Google Drawings  Google Drawings is a diagramming software included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google. It allows importing images from the computer or from the Web as well as insertin

Some of you are probably wondering why in the hell I have not mentioned GMAW/MIG - Gas Metal Arc Welding and how to teach that process to high school students and the closely related Flux Cored Arc Welding process. I am not trying to down play the the value of GMAW and FCAW I just don't put a lot of time into teaching GMAW/FCAW and this is my theory as to why I go that direction.  What you say? Surely the Great and Powerful OZ must have a long winded in depth 10,000 word dissertation stashed away that explains the everything in painful excruciating detail on how to teach high school students to wire feed weld with GMAW or FCAW.  Nope I got this one covered in about 1000 words plus or minus. I hate to disappoint anyone reading this blog post, but sadly I don't have a lot to say on this subject other than I fully realize that both of these welding processes are extremely valuable in industry, and are used a lot.  Their value is due to the higher deposition rates and the greater p

Teaching welding like a language what the hell is this guy talking about? Give me a few minutes to explain myself and the roadmap that I use. Maybe some method to the madness. One of the first "weed out" tools that welding foremen or people hiring welders use is vocabulary, they all ask a series of welding related questions to figure out the knowledge level of the applicant. To the outsider these questions although asked in English will sound like a foreign language. Realizing that this is what my students are going to encounter in a job interview, as a welding instructor one of the most important tasks that I can undertake is helping my students build a working vocabulary in welding English. This is the end goal for my students as I know that the minute they step into a job interview for a welding position they are going to be tested on their use of the welding language.  How do we do that? How do we take a person with no welding vocabulary and give them a six or eight hundr

For welding I am a firm believer in teaching students construction math, tape measure reading, welding symbols and a whole host of topics that are not taught in the weld booth burning rod. I am by no means downplaying the value of students being able to deposit sound weld metal in a weld joint as that is pretty much the whole point of welding.  The importance of the academic side of welding can also not be understated either.  The LMS (Learning Management System) has become a routine part of most high school course curriculums. The following is a definition of the LMS. A learning management system is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation and delivery of educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs. The learning management system concept emerged directly from e-Learning. ~Wikipedia In regards to the LMS and welding there are a few different directions that one can go in regards to the learning m

A little bit of context on this blog before I get too far down the rabbit hole with Alice. When I took the job as welding instructor I had never taught high school welding before I had spent years off and on traing welder sin the work place, both in construction and in manufacturing.  I went into my job thinking -"How difficult can this be?" I know how to weld students want to learn how to weld - we will all go into the shop strike an arc cut some metal, sing kumbaya around the proverbial campfire and all will be good. Except that the job I stepped into was a total rebuild from ground zero. I stepped in the door with nothing. I didn't get PowerPoints, no curriculum, no pacing guides, no lesson plans, nothing but a stack of text books, a shop that was FUBAR - (Fouled up beyond All Recognition) and a copy of 19 TAC Chapter 130. Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Career and Technical Education - Section 130.363 Welding I (Two Credits).  That was it - The other instruct

Blog rant for today has to do with welding and the teaching of welding in a public school. This is my take on teaching high school welding and I draw on some of my thoughts and experiences having come from industry as a welding engineer and CWI to teaching high school welding. I guess we can call it my manifesto of best practices and things that worked and others that didn’t work so well. First off I don’t teach vocational agricultural welding, not my game - my classes and students don’t build gates or BBQ pits. I teach my students to weld as if they are going to be going to go take an iron-worker structural welding test after leaving my class. I follow this approach in training high school students to weld because I cut my teeth as an engineer working with pipe-fitters, iron workers, sheet metal workers and boilermakers. Having worked with those trades and having friends in those trades I have a pretty good idea of the skills they are going to need to be successful.  So like every oth