Learning Sessions

What if every STEM experience became currency a young person could carry into their future? Hands-on projects, real-world problem solving, competitions, leadership experiences, and college credit do more than build knowledge—they create tangible evidence of what youth know and can do. These experiences help young people tell their story, demonstrate their skills, and unlock opportunities in college, internships, and the workforce. Discover how Project Lead The Way is helping youth turn learning into leverage—and explore how your program can create the same powerful currency for the young people you serve.

Applicable creativity powers lifelong innovation and empowers learners. In this interactive session, participants experience the Destination Imagination Creative Process—Recognize, Imagine, Collaborate, Assess, and Evaluate—to foster learner ownership and rapid ideation. Through hands-on Instant Challenges, attendees learn non-directive scaffolding to build critical thinking and resilience, leaving with actionable templates to cultivate career-ready, innovative problem solvers.

This interactive session explores what traditional measures of participation and performance in education may overlook. Participants will consider how individual learner perspectives can reveal new insights about learning experiences, help students better understand themselves, and give educators additional information to guide their classroom approach.

Michael LoPresti / CEO, Vzable

Tony Bynum / Design Institute Director, IIT

Across the country, educators, employers, and policymakers are working to create career pathways that better connect students to high-demand careers. In Ohio, the Manufacturing Pathways Pilot, a $1.76 million initiative funded by the Walton Family Foundation, supported 10 projects across 21 school districts to design and expand manufacturing pathways that integrate industry-recognized credentials, work-based learning, employer engagement, and postsecondary connections.

In this session, attendees will learn how schools, industry partners, higher education institutions, and workforce organizations collaborated to launch and strengthen career-connected pathways that reached nearly 1,000 students in the program's first year. Presenters will share pilot outcomes, lessons learned, implementation challenges, and the key conditions that enabled successful pathway development and scaling.

Participants will leave with practical strategies for building cross-sector partnerships, engaging employers in meaningful ways, integrating credentials and work-based learning into pathway design, and creating sustainable programs that align education with workforce needs. Whether you are developing a new pathway or strengthening an existing program, this session will provide actionable ideas, tools, and real-world examples that can be adapted to your local context.

Career and technical education has traditionally started in high school. But students begin deciding what they're "good at" and who they might become, long before that. By the time many young people reach a formal career pathway, they have already opted out. Central Creativity argues that the workforce pipeline needs a new first chapter. Industry, educators and community partners all have a role in writing it.

This session explores fresh ways to put real careers in front of younger students wherever they learn:

• In the classroom: elementary learners code a robot through a neighborhood of electricians, welders and paramedics in Around the Neighborhood with Evo.

• After school: the NASA Astro Camp TO GO Club brings weekly hands-on space missions to sites across grades K through 12. A live virtual instructor leads each session, so site staff have nothing extra to plan.

• In the community: in the NAPA Drive Into STEM Challenge, 97 percent of participating students said they wanted to learn more about STEM or automotive careers.

• At home: seasonal STEM kits give families science to do together.

Attendees will leave with practical models for reaching students earlier and building industry partnerships that grow the workforce from the ground up.

AI is reshaping how young people learn, create, and solve problems. How can we prepare youth to use it with purpose? In this co-presented session, KID will share how K-12 students use AI as a tool for making, inventing, and creative expression, offering strategies and insights drawn directly from classroom teachers. Technovation will walk through its learner-centered innovation process, in which youth identify real problems and use AI intentionally and ethically to research, prototype, test, and refine solutions. Participants will leave with and understanding of practical frameworks and strategies for their own classrooms and programs. 

Liza Manfred / Managing Director, Strategic Initiatives & Partnerships, KID 

Savannah Fetterolf / Managing Director, Teaching & Learning, KID 

Brittany Jenkins / Lead Curriculum Developer, Technovation

Join Stephanie Rodriguez (AAAS) and Jeremy Babendure (SciTech Institute) for a hands-on workshop using Connecting Learning to Careers, a field guide from AAAS and STEMM Opportunity Alliance partners. Learn how to connect PK–12, higher education, and workforce efforts, using your programs, data, and partnerships to build clearer, more accessible pathways into STEMM (STEM + Medicine) careers. This work supports SOA’s goal of adding 20 million people to the STEMM workforce by 2050.

Dr. Stephanie Rodriguez / Director of the STEMM Opportunity Alliance at AAAS

Dr. Jeremy Babendure / Executive Director of the SciTech Institute and Associate Professor, College of Global Futures, Arizona State University

The skills gap isn't one problem — it's three. And until education and industry can name those problems precisely, they'll keep investing in the wrong solutions.
This session introduces a research-grounded framework for understanding the mathematics-to-workforce gap and a shared skills language that educators, employers, policymakers, and funders can use to finally work from the same playbook. Participants will explore why traditional mathematics pathways are leaving too many learners without the quantitative foundations they need for STEM careers and good jobs — and what it looks like when education, industry, and community partners redesign those pathways together.

Drawing on the Dana Center's Architecting a Kindergarten-to-Workforce Talent Pipeline and From Alignment to Impact: A Mathematics Blueprint for a Future-Ready Workforce, this session moves from diagnosis to action — offering concrete strategies for cross-sector collaboration, curriculum alignment, and systemic change that participants can begin applying in their own contexts immediately.

Katey Arrington /  Charles A. Dana Center, The University of Texas at Austin

Sean Pepin / Charles A. Dana Center, The University of Texas at Austin