KSHB 41 News anchor Lindsay Shively offers coverage on a wide variety of topics, including stories of interest to consumers. Reach out to Linsday via email.
—
At our Let’s Talk events in the Northland, the coordinator of the North Kansas City School District’s Future Ready Lab told me we had to come see this place that lets kids explore and think about potential careers in technology and beyond through a really unique project.
In the Future Ready Lab at the North Kansas City School District’s Northland Innovation Center, fifth graders are working in groups to tell a story through animatronics. This time, they’re working to tell the story about a children's book author.
“We're programming a sparky or a robot,” said Kennedy Whelchel, a fifth grader. “We're using the pegs to move the mouth and make it look like it’s talking,” she said, as she and other students sat in front of a row of robots at laptops and controls.
They learn how to program every movement and record the story for the animatronic robot to tell as that author.
“What about the first time you made the robot move, what did you think?” I asked fifth grader Devaun Maxwell. “Uh it was like somehow, I don’t know how, I just felt like I'm, I can do everything now!”
They need to make it look like the author too with wardrobe. The students work on hair and makeup too, plus researching the author and more. That means there are lots of different jobs to take on.
“Its really fun, you dont know you like it until you try it and I never really thought that this could be like a job opportunity until we came to future ready lab,” said Whelchel.
Cammy Neth is the coordinator at the Future Ready Lab and says every fifth grader in the district, about two thousand students, will come to the lab for one or two days and experience this project.
“What might be out there for you, right? And if you can't, you can't be it. If you don't see it, and if you've never tried it before, you may not be aware of what you can really do.”
“It never gets old seeing them look at each other and go, I did that,” she said. “And so just giving them something that in today's age where kids are so used to digital things, being amazed at just the wonder and being curious and saying, ‘how did I do that?’ “
I asked fifth grade teacher Lisa Ours if she had seen some lightbulb moments from her students at the Future Ready Lab. “Yeah, a lot.” She said. When I asked if students were ready to think about careers in fifth grade, she said, “This is their path. This is where they're starting to think about what they're gonna do in the future, how they're gonna make a difference, this is the beginning.”
“I'm thinking about like staying here and maybe being an engineer because it is really fun,” said Kennedy.
The district said the Future Ready Lab launched in October 2024. The school district told me that ESSER funds helped start it and different federal funds now help support it. The district says the Future Ready Lab exposes students to fifty career paths they might not otherwise see.
—
