The 4-H Discovery Challenge is all about giving students a chance to dive into hands-on experiences — from science experiments to animal care, from coding robots to cooking competitions — all while exploring what they might want to do when they grow up.
“The biggest part of the Discovery programs is the Discovery Challenge,” says 4-H Educator for Discovery Programs, Bill Decker. “That’s the program where we’re going into local schools. We work with the kids teaching them how to do basic research (good research versus bad research, good sources versus bad sources). We get them to put together a presentation and do that presentation for their class. It’s what you would be used to with a normal 4-Her doing a normal project at fair, but this is in classroom with all the kids in class. It’s not a 4-H club, it’s not an after-school program. We’re working with those kids multiple years to try and build up those soft skills and presentation skills – being comfortable talking to small and big audiences – and really working on their self-confidence.”
Through workshops, mentorship, and team-based learning, 4-H hopes this new program will spark a lifelong love of learning — and maybe even help kids discover careers they never knew existed.
“We start in 3rd grade and we really are assigning students a subject…it’s either national parks or scientists and engineers and in third grade we really just help them learn to do the presentation and how not to plagiarize and how to summarize. By 4th and 5th grade we help them pick anything that’s school appropriate…still working on those presentation techniques and the backgrounds that might go on slides. By 6th grade we start using the Indiana career explorer and we start working on actual careers the kids might be looking at, so the last minute of their presentation has to be on a career. Weare looing at everything from paid education and figuring that if we can do that through the 6 years of 6-12th grade, either they’ll find something that sparks their interest and they’ll find something they want to go into, or they’ll find 6 careers they don’t want to go into….and frankly, we’re still ahead.”
So whether it’s engineering, agriculture, or the arts, the 4-H Discovery Challenge is proving that when kids explore, amazing things happen.
For more on how to get involved, search for Purdue 4-H Discovery.
Find the full interview with Bill Decker on the 4H4U Podcast here:
