Speaker Match

Challenges Entered:

Ability for teachers to find and discover professionals from the industry based on school subjects, keywords, speaking availability, and geographical location. Ability for industry professionals to find and discover speaking engagements at schools based on school subjects, their professional expertise/background, geographical location, and available times.

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Project Details

Project video:

Project Assessment

Financial support:

Project has financial support

Project goals:

The scores from the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment showed that U.S. 15-year-olds trailed their peers from many industrialized countries. The U.S. students were further behind in math and science, trailing counterparts in 23 countries. How are our children going to be able to compete with the children of the world? The answer is not well. In addition, we are not graduating enough students with the necessary skills to sustain and improve our economy. We really need to get our kids to be inspired about subjects like math and science early as possible. This is where Speaker Match comes in. Speaker Match is an online service to help teachers discover and invite professionals from the industry to speak at their classrooms. For example, a highschool instructor teaching algebra can use Speaker Match to invite game designer or NASA scientist to speak about their career and how they use algebra for their work. Getting the students excited about their studies and what they could do with it - is the primary goal of Speaker Match. Success our economy and society will depend on it.

Identified Obstacles:

Website and database to host the Speaker Match Service, trust and support from the school systems to use the service, designer(s) for the interaction and information architecture of the site, programmer(s) for the application design, and product/project manager for managing the overall project.