SCI-TALKS (Supporting Community Initiatives for Teaching, Learning, and Knowing Science), an ITEST strategies project, is designed to deliver after-school energy and environment (EE) education programs in community settings for rural low-income upper elementary students in West Virginia. The goal of SCI-TALKS is to provide pre-service and in-service teachers with professional development and technology resources to ensure that their students build workforce readiness skills through EE education program.

Society's Grand Challenges for Engineering (GCE) is the backdrop of this particular project as it works to develop socially-relevant engineering curricular modules for middle school instruction in STEM. The project team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison consists of engineering and education faculty, along with 23 middle school teachers and guidance counselors from 5 rural and urban public schools who are collaborating to design and test curricular modules and career exploration activities.

This project will enable high school and middle school STEM teachers and students to conduct environmental research aided by the analysis of images from digital cameras, scanners, and the Internet. The project explores how digital image analysis can be applied to environmental quality issues that can readily be introduced into STEM courses, engaging students and encouraging them to think about related careers. The project will develop research agendas that will employ a variety of image analysis tools.

The primary goal of the STEM Teams strategies project is to build a bridge from isolated middle schools in rural NC to the high tech resources at research universities, to effectively teach STEM (science, mathematics, & technology) content and instill an understanding of the potential of STEM careers. The middle school teachers in the selected schools will be supported by an administrative team to guide, coach, and empower the teachers to make the most of the resources.

This strategy project will engage 84 middle school teachers and 2,688 of their students from 6 New York City Title I middle schools in learning and using science, math and IT to research New York City urban ecosystems services of energy, water and biodiversity. Using inquiry, scientific method and project based learning students will acquire 21st century workforce readiness skills while being exposed to the urban jobs connected to the natural infrastructure on which the City depends.

The New York Hall of Science (NYHS), in partnership with the developers of Greater Southern Tier BOCES SciCentr program, will engage an ethnically and economically diverse group of young people in creating the Virtual Hall of Science (VHOS). This youth cohort will collaborate and work with science and education professionals to design, build, and staff a virtual science center while acquiring STEM knowledge and a range of ICT competencies. Participants will be trained as exhibit designers, builders, active exhibit guides, and mentors.

Tri-Regional Information Technology (Tri-IT), is a collaborative project building on the IT strengths at three diverse colleges located in the state of Florida. Tri-IT includes Florida State College at Jacksonville (FSCJ) in Northeast Florida, Florida A&M University (FAMU) in Northwest Florida and Seminole State College (SCC) in Central Florida. Tri-IT will address Florida's IT gender inequality in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) by serving a total of 180 high school girls.

The Bio-ITEST program is a model designed to provide secondary science teachers with the knowledge, skills, and resource materials to engage their students in the newly developing fields of bioinformatics and computational biology, ensuring that students will be able to participate in these important new workforce areas.

WestEd and the University of California-Berkeley are improving student learning and workforce preparation in science as well as information and communication technology by embedding the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program into curricula of selected high school-level green energy career academies in California. Embedding GLOBE within California's green energy academies will pave the way for broader GLOBE implementation in California and other states.

The Student Enabled Network of Sensors for the Environment using Innovative Technology (SENSE IT) project will integrate STEM skills into a robust interdisciplinary curriculum and teacher development effort by teaching 3,000 high school students to design, build, test, deploy and interpret their own environmental sensors. SENSE IT will span three distinct residential regions in New York's Hudson and St. Lawrence River valleys, as well as a diverse socioeconomic and racial spectrum.