Bethany Carlson says she “was one of those kids in high school whose social life revolved around science and design competitions.” After college, she began exploring why science classes didn’t seem to attract more women or minorities. Now she is doing something about it - and on September 20, she shared her findings in the first web seminar of a series jointly sponsored by NSDL and the National Science Teachers Association.

Carlson worked in a middle school for a couple of years, then joined the Education Development Center to write curricula. Now she is helping build The Fun Works , an NSDL collection that connects kids to a wide variety of science, technology, engineering, and math careers. Unlike sites for high schoolers which try to help students choose a single major, the FunWorks tries to broaden kids’ interests.

The FunWorks surveyed hundreds of students during the initial stages of collection development, says Carlson. They noticed that young people often name career aspirations based on a very small number of high-visibility careers, such as doctor, nurse, lawyer, basketball player, singer/rapper, teacher, day care worker, and cosmetologist. 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 a competitive admissions processes. And young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely than their more affluent peers to know the details of a career pathway.

A design team of African American and Latino young people from a Boston community center helped design FunWorks. They grouped STEM careers into six main categories: Music, Technology, Medicine/Law, Art & Design, Sports, and Exploration. 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. You can comment on Carlson’s work by visiting her post on the new blog Careers in Science. New posts will accompany each monthly NSDL/NSTA web seminar through the year. Click here for more information on the series. Free pre-registration for the seminars is required.