Green Career Awareness Program

What is the Green Career Awareness Program?

A student's career education should begin before they get to high school.

Early exposure to careers - specifically green careers - and the opportunity to explore California's industry sectors and their shifts toward environmentally-sustainable and socially-responsible practices will encourage students to use those lenses when making decisions about their post-secondary plans and life choices.

To achieve our goal, SMCOE's College, Career, and CTE team has partnered with various curriculum designers and industry partners to create a K-12 "Green Career Awareness" Program. Our program includes numerous, standards-aligned Project-Based Learning instructional modules that help students move from theory to action, "Green Careers" field trips that directly engage students with local business partners, and a high school "Green Careers" course and pre-apprenticeship program. Our vision is to work with school districts across San Mateo County and California to improve our students' green career and Career Technical Education (CTE) awareness, bolster the connections among K-12 systems, two-and-four year colleges, trade schools, and our industry sectors, and to help usher our students toward critical-demand, high-wage careers in a green workforce.

SMCOE's program helps improve students' green career awareness at the middle school level. Students learn about climate change and ecological overshoot, how specific industry sectors are responding to those issues, engage with design challenges to create their own solutions, learn about green careers in those industry sectors, and take "Green Careers" field trips to learn about local, sustainable businesses and the people that work there.

Middle School Program

Middle School Program

Agriscience

Agriscience prepares students for a wide range of careers in agriculture and animal science. Students learn about soil through hands-on investigations, simulations and data analysis, and from best practices from the agricultural industry to improve soil health in the local environment. Students also learn how to minimize the impact of climate change through carbon sequestration.

Computer Science "The World Becomes What We Code"

Students learn the basics of computer programming using JavaScript, engage with social and environmental justice messages, and how graphics are used to create impactful messages. Students work through a series of design challenges that culminate in a final project where they design a campaign to address an important issue affecting their community.

Clean Energy

The supply of clean water and the efficient use of energy and water are essential to human health and well-being. Student explore the connection between water heating and climate change, design insulation and conduction experiments, build their own solar water heater prototype, identify barriers and solutions to adopting solar water heating, and reflect on career opportunities in the energy, environment, and utilities industries.

Green Engineering (With Micro:bits)

Engineers envision the future and use the engineering-design process to help solve today's problems. Students learn this process, how people and places are affected by climate change, and use engineering-design protocols to solve problems and mitigate the human impact on the environment using micro:bits - a pocket sized computer.

Green Engineering (Without Micro:bits)

The fictitious island of Nomilu'u faces several crises related to the impacts of climate change, such as sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and flooding. Students learn about the work of coastal engineers and use the engineering-design process to solve one of these issues to save population of this island nation.

Industrial Biotechnology

To reduce the impacts of plastic on the environment, we must replace fossil fuel-based plastics with biodegradable and sustainable materials during the product design and manufacturing processes. Students help solve the “plastic problem” by creating durable, biologically-sourced, sustainable materials to replace traditional plastics used in our homes and schools.

Product Innovation and Design

Over millions of years of evolution, nature has found ways to solve problems that are similar to those found in the manufacturing and product design industry sectors. Biomimicry is a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges. Student use an online design tool, Tinkercad, to solve a problem using the principles of biomimicry and design thinking.

Instructional Modules in Development (June, 2023)

Sustainable Food
Green Transportation
Green Buildings
Clean Power
Robotics
Clean Water

It’s never too early to start thinking of your career and the many ways you can build skills to help solve humanity’s biggest issues.