Hello, everybody! Thanks for visiting the blog for the NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar 2007 Fall Series. My name is Bethany Carlson, and I worked with project director Sarita Nair-Pillai on the creation of the FunWorks NSDL collection.

A little about me:
I have a B.S. in engineering—I was one of those kids in high school whose social life revolved around science and design competitions, and majoring in anything else in college wasn’t ever a consideration. After college, though, I went looking for the reasons that my university classes were so lacking in diversity. I worked in a middle school for a couple of years, supporting the math and science teachers’ reform efforts, and then, inspired by the increasing appearance of engineering as a high school elective, I joined the Education Development Center to write curricula. At the time, a team at EDC was updating modules for the Ford Academy of Manufacturing Science (FAMS) program, which is now the Ford Partnership for Advanced Studies (http://www.fordpas.org/).

A little about the FunWorks (http://www.thefunworks.org):
The goal behind the FunWorks NSDL collection is to connect kids to a wide variety of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers and to show them how taking math and science classes now can prepare them for such careers. Unlike sites for high schoolers which try to help students choose a single major, the FunWorks tries to broaden kids’ interests.

We talked with and surveyed hundreds of students during the initial stages of collection development, and observed trends in their responses which the teachers among you probably recognize from your own classrooms:
1) Young people often name career aspirations based on a very small number of high-visibility careers: The responses of doctor, nurse, lawyer, basketball player, singer/rapper, teacher, day care worker, and cosmetologist emerged again and again as we asked kids what work they thought they might do in the future.
2) Their ideas about the connections between school and future work are vague. Students who say they want to become doctors, for example, might say that they need to study biology now and go to college later, but they often don’t know that math and chemistry are important, too, or how grades in all subjects factor into competitive admissions processes. Young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely than their more affluent peers to know career pathway details. (A sneaky FunWorks secret: every career profile recommends taking more math of some kind as preparation!)

A design team of African American and Latino young people from a local (Boston-area) community technology center made the design and navigation decisions reflected in the FunWorks site as it is today. Based on the survey data and on their own hobbies and interests, the team decided to group STEM careers into 5 main categories: Music, Technology, Medicine/Law, Art & Design, Sports, and the catch-all, Exploration. (They also insisted that kids have a way to go directly to the games!) Many careers are cross-listed, so by clicking on a single category, a young person gets a list of careers which they might not have considered individually.

With the help of students and teachers, the FunWorks collection is still evolving. The site publishes youth-created content, so if your students interview a STEM professional or research a particular career, please consider having them submit their write-ups to the FunWorks. If students are disappointed at not finding specific careers profiled, then they have the option of adding those careers themselves! (Submissions can be sent to spillai@edc.org)

Again, thanks for checking out the blog, and please come and visit the FunWorks after tonight’s Web Seminar!
Cheers,
Bethany