A large Illinois school district established a partnership with Project Lead The Way (PLTW) to deliver STEM-focused curriculum intended to improve the skill sets of their students. The programs and materials from PLTW are developed by educators, who also work to continually improve them and provide ongoing value to schools. According to their website, “Project Lead The Way motivates, prepares, and supports teachers as they strive to make every child in every grade STEM-successful.”

PLTW curriculum focuses on highly collaborative, professional-grade skills development using advanced real-world, industry standard tools. For example, the engineering programs available to teachers and students include AutoCAD, robotics software, biomedical tools, and computer science applications.

As the school district’s IT environment and associated devices were unable to handle the advanced technology requirements for students and teachers to access the PLTW curriculum, they asked Sentinel to help transition a portion of their infrastructure into the cloud. Sentinel partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on this project, which involved designing and deploying a robust and optimized cloud solution capable of meeting the resource demands of PLTW programs and beyond. Sentinel and AWS delivered this solution within budget constraints from the district, which was only able to afford minimal capital and operational expenditures.

The new AWS cloud solution enables the school district to increase or decrease the number of students with access to PLTW resources as needed, as well as adjust the hardware resources running the software when desired. It also became easier than ever to deliver these applications to a variety of endpoints including tablets, PCs, Mac, and even Linux. Rather than pay a substantial price for hardware stored in their data center, the district instead only pays for the resources actually consumed, allowing costs to remain affordable.

The feedback on the new solution from both teachers and students has been overwhelmingly positive. The school district continues to add PLTW applications in an effort to support new and more advanced learning. They have expressed deep gratitude to the Sentinel and AWS teams for working within constraints to help make this project a reality, helping to unlock another level of success for students. The district looks forward to collaborating with Sentinel and AWS on future projects.

Reach out to your Sentinel Account Manager, or contact us to learn more about how we can help your organization obtain the technology solutions to achieve even greater success!