This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to create a content and delivery platform to facilitate interactive learning for career education - addressing the application in support of teaching and/or learning subtopic. The project will develop a prototype of the Career Simulation Environment (CSE) - an engaging, exploratory and constructivist environment that will better inform youth about the kind of opportunities that will be available to them when they grow up. In addition, it will reinforce the habits, skills and values that they should acquire in preparation for those opportunities. It is hypothesized that students will be more motivated to explore careers in an active manner and more motivated to pursue careers that they have been able to 'taste'. Career simulations must be complex enough to gain credibility with students, be comprehensive enough to model career skills and satisfy curriculum requirements, and yet be highly usable. This project is uniquely suited to address this problem by combining best practices and research from the fields of adolescent career preparation, human computer interaction, gaming and e-learning. The proposed research will substantially extend previous research and practice in career exploration through an interdisciplinary approach to the development of and evaluation of career explorations simulation tools
