(OMAHA, NE) – BEST Center partnered with Metropolitan Community College to host the seventh Building Automation Systems (BAS) Workshop for 30 community and technical college educators from across the country. Hosted on the Metropolitan Community College (MCC) campus in Omaha, NE from June 7-9, the workshop focused on networking and programming skills required by building technicians to be successful in future roles.
“As building management systems evolve, the skills required of technicians to service these systems also evolve. This workshop was focused on providing instructional methods and ideas for teaching some of the more complex topics in building automation, such as networking and programming to control and meet an established sequence of operation,” says Brian Lovell, BEST Center Co-Principal Investigator.
BEST Center is excited to partner with Metropolitan Community College, the second largest college system in Nebraska, because it is the leading building sciences educator in the region. Last year, MCC built the new Construction Education Center (CEC) which located all of the construction trades in a single building, from carpentry and electrical to heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, and refrigeration (HVAC/R), plumbing, welding, and design, for the first time since the college expanded past a single campus.
MCC first began working with the BEST Center during the planning stages of the CEC and as part of its NSF Project Grant: Automate! which focused on the concept of using Building Automation Systems to contextualize Information Technology (IT) education and as an alternative career path for IT. The grant concluded but successfully proved its primary concept; additionally, MCC developed a recruiting workshop known as BoxIT where participants construct a rudimentary model of a strip mall and assemble a zoned heating air system and program the associated control system.
“MCC has been looking forward to the opportunity to host a BEST Center workshop since the first workshop I attended, hosted by Kele. It is our intention to become a beacon in our region for training of HVAC/R and most especially BAS; we see this BEST workshop as one of the first steps in achieving this goal,” says Robert Nirenberg, HVAC/R and BAS Faculty of Metropolitan Community College.
About BEST Center
The Building Efficiency for a Sustainable Tomorrow (BEST) Center supports publicly funded 2-year colleges with programs in HVAC/R, BAS, and energy/facilities management. Sponsored by Advanced Technological Education grants from the National Science Foundation, this national collaborative promotes state-of-the-art building technician education and dissemination of the latest research, technology, and industry collaborations in energy-efficient buildings.
For more information, go to: www.bestctr.org; www.laney.edu; www.nsf.gov; www.mccneb.edu
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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1700705.
Contact: Larry Chang, BEST Center Program Manager, laneyect@gmail.com