Describe and/or Draw Your STEAM Career, in Words or Visuals a Young Child Would Understand!

December SciComm Challenge

December is the season of giving – and giving back too!

We are crowdsourcing content for an A-Z STEAM Careers Lifeology flashcard deck for a very important audience! We also want to help Letters to a Pre-Scientist raise funds to help bring more diverse representations of scientists to kids in underserved communities. 

No matter where they live, what they look like, or what is happening globally, every child deserves to believe they can become scientists or have a career in STEAM. The Lifeology community can use the Lifeology platform to raise awareness of the many career paths and possibilities, ensuring diverse and inclusive representation. (Check out our Women in STEAM flashcard deck as an example!) We are committed to creating educational resources that reflect the diversity of our global community.

This month, we will be using our Social Media channels and our Slack Workspace to crowdsource ideas, descriptions, and visual representations of science careers to include in a new A-Z STEAM Careers flashcard deck! From Dec 2nd, we will feature a different letter of the alphabet and ask you to either describe, draw, or both your STEAM career or suggest a STEAM career that starts with the letter that we should feature (help us by tagging people in that career to participate!)

There are many different ways to get involved – Help us create an A-Z Lifeology digital flashcard deck for kids that shows the vast diversity of careers in STEAM and what it looks like to do science!

You can contribute by:

  • Briefly describing, in 180 characters or 1-2 sentences, your STEAM career! Keep it broad enough that a child could read this description and get an idea of what professionals in this field do and why. For example, “An archeologist is a scientist who…” Your possibilities for this description are vast, but start with the basics that a child might want to know if they were considering this career.

What do people in your STEAM career do and why? What kind of questions do people in your STEAM career seek to answer? How do people in your STEAM career approach answering these questions and what are the implications? What is exciting about this STEAM career?

  • Drawing/Doodling your STEAM career! Create a digital or hand drawing, painting, or doodle that represents your science career in a creative way. Here, you can get a bit more specific and visualize what YOU do specifically as someone in this career. It might show a child what day-to-day work in your STEAM career actually looks like!
  • Selfie your STEAM career! Take a selfie that represents your work, interests, or outcomes related to your STEAM career! Get creative and remember that it’s important to humanize your career and show your passion for it, in order to inspire young ones to pursue it.
  • Suggest another A-Z career that we should include in our flashcard deck for kids!

Do one or all of the above! Here’s a template [Canva Version, PDF Version] you can use to submit an example Lifeology “flashcard” for your science career. 

Submit your STEAM career descriptions/drawings through social media tagging @Lifeologyapp #STEAMRoleModel, or e-mail them to Lifeology@lifeomic.com! The subject of your email should read LPS A-Z Careers. 

How do I submit my work? 

If you are submitting your work via your social media account please tag us on our Instagram or Twitter account. You can also post to our Slack Workspace – use the #scicomm-challenge-of-the-month channel. You can also DM us on Slack if you are shy! 

Will I be featured in the Lifeology A-Z Science Careers flashcard deck? How can the deck be used?

We will be creating our A-Z Science Careers flashcard deck based on your submissions to this scicomm challenge! Our focus will be choosing a diversity of career paths that highlight diverse scientists. If we select your science career, we will create a custom professional illustration of it for its flashcard! We will use any visual you submitted as inspiration, so doodle away and get creative!

Even if we don’t select your science career for inclusion in the flashcard deck, we will still feature in a curated blog post here at Lifeology at the end of December.

We will make the A-Z Science Careers flashcard deck freely accessible to all under a Creative Commons license, meaning that teachers, kids, parents, and anyone else can use this card deck, print it out, adapt it, or anything they’d like!

Here are two examples of the template used as a blurb and drawing submission. These templates will be used as reference documents when compiling the card deck, we will also feature submissions in an upcoming blog post and on social media. We have a team of illustrators we can use for this deck, and if you wish to be an illustrator on this deck – then get in touch!

Paige Science Career
Communications manager Visual - LPS Lifeology