Communications

Challenge Overview

What if a bottle of perfume or cologne could make you a better technology and engineering educator?

For this year’s Communications Challenge, we’re asking you to take something that is usually associated with luxury, glamour, and over-the-top advertising—perfume or cologne commercials—and use it to communicate an important idea from technology and engineering education.

The Standards for Technological and Engineering Literacy (STEL) provide a framework for technological and engineering education, including practices that describe what technologically and engineering literate students should be able to do. But what if those practices were not simply words in a document or actions of successful literacy, but the newest luxury fragrance on the market?

For this challenge, your team will select one or more practices from ITEEA’s Standards for Technological and Engineering Literacy (STEL) and construct a 3–4 minute fictional perfume or cologne commercial advertising your chosen practice(s). Think of the dramatic, mysterious, and sometimes wonderfully ridiculous style of a high-end fragrance advertisement: sweeping shots, intense music, poetic narration, glamorous product shots, extreme promises, strange locations, and people confidently declaring that a particular scent has changed their lives.

Your challenge is to make the audience think, laugh, maybe cry, but to ultimately engage them creatively, and, by the end of the commercial, help them understand what the selected STEL practice actually means and why it matters in technology and engineering education.