Powerful influences benefit from creating and maintaining dependencies on their policies, products, and services. These forces can be both beneficial and harmful, particularly for the young and uninitiated. An educator's role is to assist students in identifying practices and pursuits that establish the strongest foundation for productive, flexible, and successful futures. This is the basis of the ACES program.
The ACES program was conceived in 2003 with the conviction that Georgian futures would be advantaged through an exposure to the application of mathematics and computer technology to the physical act of creation. Prior to this, most Georgians heading off to engineering had no practical experience with what the discipline required. This was the catalyst for change. Now, after two decades of offering Georgians this exposure, RSGC remains surprisingly alone in this conviction and commitment to its graduates' futures. Despite the overwhelming influence of computer technology in our society, few secondary schools offer a comprehensive three-year engineering and design program, despite the fact that,
- the world continues to increase its dependency and reliance on the Hardware, Software, and Design domains we champion,
- parents of ACES' alumni understand and appreciate the difference it has made in their son's post-RSGC futures, and,
- some prospective families are choosing RSGC, partially for our program
The contradiction of the ACES program, on the other hand, is that university admissions criteria continues to, inadvertently, penalize Georgians for the precise skills they have worked hard to master. It is so unusual for undergraduate applicants to possess the ACES skill set, their admissions process neither looks for it, nor values it and, in the past, had outright rejected our legitimate (TE???) course codes. So, to be honest, if your SOLE goal is to simply gain EARLY acceptance to university, you would be better off NOT taking our courses and investing the dozens, if not hundreds, of hours spent on ACES project pursuits in the mastery of mathematics and science questions from their respective textbooks. Furthermore, the money you spend on components and our workbooks could be spent on retaining a tutor as so many others are doing. Of course I'm not suggesting this, because medium and long term views of your future opportunities, outside of mainstream academia, will be SIGNIFICANTLY advantaged by your unique ACES skill set.
In an effort to mitigate the myopic view of many of our most popular universities, I have responded by changing the course codes for our three ACES courses after 2017-2018 to ones the universities understand (ICS2O (ICD2O), ICS3U, and ICS4U). Furthermore, I understand the current university admission mark requirements leave precious little room between reality and impossible perfection. Students who work hard at developing our skills will be advantaged in this regard.