The United States is behind many countries in the world in producing college graduates in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields ranking 20th worldwide.  The National Science Board studied the decision process of a child through their K-12 studies and their choice of career field for their post secondary education. 22% of youth who chose a STEM major in college had taken an advanced math class in high school while only 11% of youth enrolled in STEM fields with Algebra 2 or less.  Creating an environment where youth feel successful with STEM skills affects their decision to pursue scientific careers in college.  

As a way to cultivate youth interest in stem careers, Green County 4-H received a three year grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency Program totaling $32,000 to provide mentoring based activities in science programs with forty-two youth and eleven mentors.  Teen and adults were screened and targeted with youth in a small group mentoring environment exposing the middle school aged youth to numerous science programs.  Youth have learned forensic skills, computer coding and application programming, engineering design and with robotics and wearable technology, studied marine animal diversity and focused on a multi-month project in conjunction with the 2017 solar eclipse. Since the nation was focused on Kentucky as the prime location for this year's total solar eclipse, the youth designed telescopes, created models representing the vastness of space, learned computer programming skills necessary for planetary robots and participated in the total solar eclipse activity.  With their skills, the group assisted with a community service project involving over 1200 youth in our local school system sharing their love of science by providing safety glasses for all students to safely view the eclipse.  

 During the science based activities, the youth gain confidence in their science and math abilities as they discover how these skills are ubiquitous in our lives and will dominate their future.  The youth see connections between the science of their everyday life and how accessible science based careers are with their new found confidence in their science discovery skills.  As a result of the youth's participation, 51% of the participants are taking the highest level of math offered at their current school and considering future careers like marine biology, engineer and computer programmer.