Age-appropriate, educational resources are a key medium for early STEM education and getting children engaged in the sciences, which is critical for helping children pursue interests and develop goals that can aid in academic and professional success. The ultimate audience for this topic are reading-aged kids, approximately elementary to young middle schoolers, as well as adults, parents, and educators seeking resources to support them. Thus, the constraints are set to what kids are able to easily access, understand, and enjoy. Educational contexts are absolutely key to this project: these resources are best used when facilitated by an adult who can create effective discourse, which connects to its purpose as a resource bank for early STEM education. This being said, I also aimed to make this navigable for the curious kids who want to learn on their own so that they can locate the resources written specifically for them. I believe that the genres of a google slides presentation, a video, and a letter from the editor can all be used to enhance an educational website and help make it functional. Often found in schools and workplaces, a slideshow with large text and visual imagery will help convey important information in a concise and visually appealing manner with a young audience in mind. As author Jenae Cohn puts it in her essay "Understanding Visual Rhetoric", "Some audiences need visuals to think through an idea, and using graphs and diagrams can express some ideas more clearly than text can. So, we have to take visuals into account as part of understanding communication," (Cohn 21). My second genre is an instructional video on a simple science experiment. This genre can also be found in a classroom setting, but is also widely accessible for an expanded audience online. This video will help to engage kids who are less reading-inclined, allowing my message to reach further and aid in hands-on learning. Finally, I am including a letter from the editor explaining my motivations behind this website. This genre is text-based, and its audience is for the parents, educators, etc. of young children with the purpose of generating credibility for myself and my materials along with my research paper. If adults aren't able to learn about the importance of STEM education, their kids won't be able to reap the benefits of it.
From this project, I learned how to create text and visual materials that are geared towards a young audience. As a student I am very used to creating work that is geared towards students and adult instructors, which is a wildly different audience and demands very different skills. From switching between genres, I learned how and when to be succinct and when to be very detailed. A written letter demands a lot more words than a presentation and is less visual, for example. It is important to use the right amount of words and detail in different contexts in order to keep readers engaged.
I hope my young audience will come out of this project with a better understanding of certain scientific principles and a desire to learn more on their own. For my adult audience, I hope to instill knowledge of the importance of early STEM education in them so they are better prepared to support their young engineers, scientists, and beyond.
Works Cited
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Cohn, Jenae. “Understanding Visual Rhetoric.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writings, vol. 3, Parlor Press, Anderson, South Carolina, 2020, pp. 18–39.
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Moonves, Sara. “A Letter From the Editor.” W Magazine, 30 Sept. 2019, https://www.wmagazine.com/story/letter-from-the-editor-new-originals.
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