NEW GTAW CURRICULUM NEARS COMPLETION

by Steve Houston

It's time to start budgeting for the new Gas Tungsten Arc Welding curriculum. We still have a few months of work ahead of us yet, but all the hard work of scripting is done and the Instructor's Guide and Student Workbook are well underway. So, the new material should be in your hands early next year.

If you have adopted the AWS S.E.N.S.E. program, you’ll be pleased to know that the new material is based on EG2.0 and QC10, the American Welding Society’s standards for entry-level welders. Even if you haven't, you'll love working with this new material.

The new GTAW curriculum will include 33 modules covering carbon steel, stainless steel and aluminum. We've added some new skill exercises to make the curriculum truly all-position. And we've expanded the theory to include a more comprehensive overview of the GTAW process, as well as a brand new module called "The Essentials of GTAW," designed to get student started on the right foot.

However, some of the biggest improvements over the old GTAW curriculum come in the area of metallurgy. If you've been struggling to put together a module on the metallurgy of carbon steel that provides a simple, straight forward discussion of the changes that occur in steel during heating and cooling—something that students can really make sense of and apply to welding—you'll love the new module on "The Metallurgy and Weldability of Carbon Steel."

The modules on "The Welding Characteristics of Stainless Steel" and "The Welding Characteristics of Aluminum" have also been enhanced to reflect the knowledge requirements of an increasingly challenging workplace.

If you like what we did with our GMAWB and SMAWB curriculum materials, you should be very pleased with the new GTAWB courseware. And yes, we will extend upgrade pricing to anyone who is using the existing GTAW curriculum.

Steve Houston is the Director of Curriculum Materials Development at HIWT. For pricing and upgrade information, call 800 332-9448 ext. 5433, or you can email Steve at steve.houston@welding.org.