All hands on tech
Skills Nova Scotia event gives students a taste of life on the job
TRURO, N.S. – Ben Babineau first discovered his knack for electrical engineering when he built his own Macbook to play video games.
The budding techie further refined his skills at the Skilled Futures in Technology Workshop on Oct. 29. Some 58 school students from across the region enjoyed a chance to try their hands at potential future tech careers at the Nova Scotia Community College’s Truro campus.
“I’m hoping to use this skill to be able to pursue a career in electrical engineering,” said Babineau, a Grade 11 student at Parrsboro Regional High School. “It is where I have to take apart and build all kinds of electronics, not just computers.”
Once Babineau graduates high school, he plans on pursuing electrical engineering courses at both Acadia and Dalhousie universities to gain his certifications.
“It’s a lot cheaper to build a computer,” said Babineau.
Meantime, Blair Lambert from Truro junior was hard at work drawing comic book characters. This entails pencil sketches of thumbnail-sized characters and mastering techniques, such as making drawings look more ‘3D’ on a 2D sheet of paper.
Lambert for her part still has not quite yet decided if she wants to make a career out of 2D animation. She simply said, “I found myself really good so I just kept going.”
“I think it’s just really inspiring, since you can learn a bunch of stuff from it,” said Lambert.
Over in the NSCC’S ‘green room’ studio, a group of students experimented with practicing movie-like poses against a digitally-created background. Computergenerated settings could be anything from a desert landscape to Red Square in Moscow. As film actors play out their roles on green screen, computer screens flash up the background imagery.
Student Liam Holeiter learned light is key in green screen film production. The Ecole acadienne de Truro student said lighting “played a much bigger role than I originally thought,” as he experimented against a digitally-created Red Square.
Instructor Crystal Marshall said green screen special effects are used in movies and the ‘in between’ film slides of video games.
“On TV they do (green screen) for when they do the news,” said Marshall. “We see the green screen and then the effects are piped in through that. (It’s) done live.”
The Skilled Futures series run by Skills Canada is a oneday career exploration program offered to students across Nova Scotia. As well as green screens, 2D animation and engineering, students learned about virtual reality and video game design.
Skills Canada – Nova Scotia says the fast-growing IT sector has created a huge demand for technology talent in Nova Scotia.
“Without trying it out first, most students never know that the option exists,” said Laura King, program manager at Skills Canada Nova Scotia.