Future SCANN: A Network to Help Students Envision and Co-Design Careers of the Future

DesignWorlds for Learning Inc. and DesignWorlds for College/Careers have developed a Future STEAM Careers Navigator and Network (Future SCANN) to help students navigate, envision, and create STEAM careers—those in science, technology, engineering/entertainment, arts, and math. Future SCANN is a dynamic, Web-based environment where youth can get hands-on experience in these fields using media-rich design challenges and projects. The goal is to connect students with futures thinking about alternative possible future STEAM-related careers. Building on and aggregating resources from exemplary Web sites—such as the Sloan Career Cornerstone Center, TheFuturesChannel.com, TED.com, and OpenIdeo.com—Future SCANN will build bridges between students and existing communities that are solving major twenty-first-century global challenges for humanity. Students in middle and high school will thus learn how STEAM careers of the future will address and solve complex problems.

Future SCANN will also build on and leverage partnerships with existing large national (and international) communities of student teams who are already actively involved in futures and design thinking and problem-solving challenges, such as the Future Problem Solving Program International, Open IDEO, and The Tech Museum of San Jose's annual Tech Challenge. FutureSCANN will extend the active challenge-based learning approaches of these groups to helping students explore their own possible alternative future STEAM-related careers. The project will include building an online mentor community, where youth can join teams of multidisciplinary professionals, parents, and peers in guided interactive "real world" STEAM career challenges.

Who should attend: Educators, career counselors/advisors, students, business people, and labor/education policy makers.

What you’ll learn: This session will present ways to bring futures thinking, problem solving, and design techniques into direct alignment with alternative future career exploration, using both social web 2.0 and design challenges and problem solving. Essentially, participants will discover a framework for exploring future STEAM (science, technology, engineering/entertainment, arts, and math) related careers as a "design challenge."

We will leverage well-tested methodologies of groups such as Future Problem-Solving Program International; Ideo/OpenIdeo, and the Stanford d-school ("Design School); and the annual Tech Challenge of the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose in co-creating a web-based navigation tool and a social network to support high school and college students in exploring their own personal futures.

How this new knowledge can be applied: The techniques and technology tools of Future SCANN may be used by all who are interested in exploring their own future careers or helping their own kids or students explorations of alternative possible future careers.

Ted M. Kahn, co-founder, president, and CEO of DesignWorlds for Learning Inc.; chief learning officer/learning and careers coach, for DesignWorlds for College and Careers, Cupertino, California

Leslie Schneider, president, Formative Networks; consultant for Design Worlds for Learning Inc., Newton, Massachusetts

Note: A small group of high school students will also be selected to participate in this panel, drawn from local affiliates of Future Problem-Solving Program International and high school or college student clients of DesignWorlds for College and Careers.