Real Life Applications and Opportunities
Know a kid who wants to change the world? Help ignite their spark for STEM with these resources.
Job Gateway℠: Career Development Tools
Job Gateway℠ is part of the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry’s initiative to transform the landscape of how job-seekers find family sustaining jobs and how employers find the skilled candidates that they need. Through this initiative, a user-friendly, premiere job-matching system is being created to help bridge the gap that currently exists between job-seekers and employers.
STEMjobs.com
STEM Jobs connects students to careers in science, technology, engineering and math by engaging them with what they love, like sports and music. Their free, digital magazine, available on the website, has featured companies ranging from National Geographic to Cirque du Soleil to ESPN.
Not only does STEM Jobs encourage all students to pursue these careers through an engaging media platform that includes the magazine, website and social media, but also through an online assessment.
The assessment results, based on the students’ skills and preferences, matches them to a STEM Type, which is then correlated to actual jobs. STEM Jobs is further developing this innovative platform to add more features, like internships, scholarships, schools and employers. Go to STEMjobs.com where students will discover opportunities they never knew existed and gain some guidance as they start to figure out what they want to do with their lives.
In addition check out the STEM Type quiz. Not everyone who works in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields are cut from the same cloth. To breakdown stereotypes and encourage more people to pursue STEM education and careers, STEM Jobs has developed 10 “STEM Types” based on the knowledge and skills that directly relate to real world jobs. By taking this quiz, students discover their top three STEM Types. They will help identify STEM career paths by connecting students to actual jobs.
Fun Stuff
- Pittsburgh Regional Science & Engineering Fair – More than 1,000 students (Grades 6-12) compete for more than $1,000,000 in cash and scholarships.
- CanTEEN – CanTEEN, Career Exploration is an innovative resource to inspire girls to see themselves in STEM careers through gaming and online activities.
- Future City Competition – Middle school students use SimCity software, then build a scale model city of their own, to solve specific urban challenges.
- Chain Reaction Contraption Competition – high school teams work with an engineer mentor to devise an engineering solution to a particular challenge in 20 or more steps, by creating chain reactions.