Kent Technology Academy students from Mill Creek Middle School have been invited to represent the school globally at Microsoft’s Global Enterprise Challenge (GEC), but the program is stalled due to differences in the district’s IT setup.
The KTA is one of two schools in the United States to join the competition, which has run for eight years. Competing schools are from countries as distant as Albania and Armenia, but also include Jamaica, Singapore and Bangladesh.
Students work in teams as part of a mock international corporation to design, engineer and market a new product. To stress the international and multicultural integration, each corporation constitutes five-person regional teams in different nations.
Mill Creek teacher Tyler Baril said that the KTA got information about the competition from a source close to Microsoft. They opted to jump into the program which, according to Baril, was both good and bad. On one hand, it helped secure a spot in the program, but it also made them commit before they were sure of what it required.
“We didn’t quite understand when we said just how much IT adjustment we’d need,” Baril said. “It was something that we kind of jumped into before we knew all the facts.”
For now, Mill Creek administrators and teachers will need to meet with the district’s IT department to discuss how to get permissions for the GEC’s office utilities as well as Facebook and Twitter that are restricted by the district.
“It has basically said that, at this point in time, we can’t support it, and they specifically directed everybody to not utilize the applications that they were supposed to be using,” said Regina Hauptmann, Mill Creek assistant principal.
“The technical end of this takes a little bit longer than expected. It took awhile to communicate with someone from the global enterprise challenge and Microsoft,” said Rafael Gallardo, the district’s senior IT administrator.
The issue is due to incoming software certificates that the district’s computers are unable to recognize because of older software.
While the GEC uses all of the Microsoft Office 365 utilities, many of them aren’t used by Kent students on their 2010 editions of the program.
The district is coordinating with tech specialists in London and Australia to resolve the problem, but it’s not as easy as flipping a switch, Gallardo said.
The Mill Creek administration team will meet again with the teachers on Dec. 1 to further discuss the options and requirements for the program.
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