Manaus, the capital of Brazilian Amazon state demands a rapid increase in the number of highly qualified professionals, mostly for its Industrial Pole. Hardware and software development for the consumer electronics and telecommunication sectors are the most challenging areas, due to the amount of open positions contrasting with the quality of local educational Institutions. To address this issue a local higher education organization (Institute of Computing of the Federal University of Amazonas) started, in partnership with Samsung da Amazonia Ltd. (the local subsidiary of the Korean conglomerate), a large scale program based on the so called multiple vortices, and comprising of set of involving activities, including training in classroom, and enrolling students in initiation or graduate projects. After three year of running program, the authors proposed a survey to verify the results achieved so far, more specifically on those two mentioned activities. The survey is designed to answer two questions: A) How mature is the participant in understanding his career; B) How is the participant's perception of the program efficiency in meeting his expectations. The survey is composed by 41 yes/no questions covering five different topics: 1) Perception about career and marked demands; 2) Information about the program purpose and objectives; 3) Changes in the career plan and expectations of the future; 4) Perceived relevance of the program; 5) Strength and weaknesses of the running program. Anti-redundant questions (i.e. two answers leads the same conclusion when one is yes and the other is no) were used to reduce bias and to assign a confidence level to the respondent, afterwards used to weight the student's contribution to the final statistics. The survey was applied to current and former program participants. The paper will detail the results, and the corrective actions suggested by the students' answers. Furthermore, the survey itself, the design and application methodology, which was based on a pilot group of students, will be part of the results presented in this paper.
['José Reginaldo Hughes Carvalho', 'Elaine Oliveira', 'Irene Andrea V. A. Carvalho']
STEM education program evaluation survey: A report of experience