Sidebar: Training the Nation's Next IT Leaders

The Chicago Academy for Advanced Technology won't only be unique because of what it teaches, but also how it teaches. School officials plan to arm students with innovative tools to conquer the complicated and ever-changing technology sector. And they'll be able to see how well they're doing as they learn.

According to Matt Hancock, executive director of the Center for Polytechnical Education, a nonprofit organization that operates the academy, some courses on the tech menu include: training on a robotics application developed at Carnegie Mellon based on the Lego Mindstorms platform of programmable blocks; Alice, educational software that teaches children computer programming in a 3-D environment; and Netiquette, a set of standards designed to facilitate proper interaction on blogs, forums and other Web 2.0 outlets. Students will learn this and more during their first two years of instruction in a junior academy, which lays the foundation for a more specialized focus for the following two years.

"The senior academy is going to be relatively unstructured, where the students are an active participant in determining what they're going to be learning with their teachers, faculty adviser and industry mentor. And a lot of the learning is going to be done outside, off campus," Hancock said. The off-campus work will include internships and working on projects with organizations, like businesses and city colleges.

There are plans for students to be able to regularly measure their own performance thanks to real-time data collection. As students meet objectives throughout the year, their progress will be notated and entered into a database. The data will be collected and updated in real time to reflect students' handling of different benchmarks.

"It's going to be unlike anything you've probably ever seen in any high school," Hancock said. "The whole basis of the program is that students will -- as quickly or as slowly as they need to -- master the same level of content. We're taking data on how the students are learning every single day."