Our students are creative, think outside the box, willing to try new things, and always thinking about their careers. As an enrichment facilitator, I really enjoy encouraging their ideas for projects and potential business ideas. We also enjoy having the ability to take the tools in our CollabLab, Maker Studio, and Robotics Studio into classrooms so that students can use them to extend their learning beyond the regular education curricula.
We have been working to encourage career exploration among our students, and they are now fully embracing the importance of understanding what they want out of life!
They are working to find ways to engage with tools that professionals in their fields of interest are using. Our students have a strong interest in STEAM fields, but many other students have interests in writing literature when they graduate. With such a wide variety of interests, we need to be able to provide them with a large library of career based materials.
My Project
When our students come to us for career research help, one of the most common things we try to encourage is to engage with materials used by professionals in the field. Many times, that includes books that professionals actually use in their daily life, but it can also refer to books that help students understand what it means to have a career in a certain field.
We've worked hard to build a library of resources for careers in most of the STEM fields, particularly the design and engineering fields, but we need a few more resources to be able to meet all student requests.
The MakerSpace Project Book and Make Design Matter books will help our students who are interested in engineering work through some projects we have planned for them. These projects will help them get the experience of producing a prototype for a client, in this case our elementary students! The 2 books about Zines are to help our students in interested in digital media and marketing explore another way to employ their writing interests in the virtual world. The business workbook (Mind Your Business) will be an invaluable resource for students who intend to go into business for themselves. The Tetris Effect and Your Move will engage our students who are interested in graphic design, as we challenge them to apply their art abilities to board and video game projects to investigate this aspect of a career in graphic design. The Broad Band book will serve as a book club choice to engage more female students in exploring fields long seen as male-dominated. Finally, the Third Teacher will serve as a guide for our teachers as we encourage this type of student research.
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