WVPB Builds Interactive STEAM Career Videos

West Virginia Public Broadcasting has been hard at work creating a pilot, interactive, web-video series called West Virginia STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math). It’s a collection of videos designed to inspire middle school kids, and arm teachers and parents with tools to help students navigate possible career options in the state.

What is STEAM?

At West Virginia Public Broadcasting, we’re taking STEM—an acronym for Science Technology, Engineering, and Math—and adding Arts to build STEAM in our communities and classrooms.

Why Art? So many STEM professionals talk about how important creativity and critical thinking are when it comes to conceiving outside-the-box solutions or innovations in STEM fields.  So STEAM is just an amped-up version of STEM, and a more interdisciplinary approach to learning.

The idea for our STEAM initiative was the result of a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting and the state’s Department of Education. We want to give our educators tools to help inspire kids to be excited about learning science and math, and to teach kids about the variety of jobs in the state where we really need to develop a trained workforce.

We developed a pilot interactive video series around a handful of professionals who are engaged in STEAM careers in West Virginia: a researcher, a nurse, a pipefitter, an artist, and a couple forensic scientists. All the videos are presented in one YouTube Splash Page. Choose your own adventure: