Teen tech survey

Wednesday, February 01, 2006
08:02 PM

Teen tech survey: "David Pescovitz:
The 2006 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, a survey about American attitudes toward invention and innovation, has gathered some interesting data about teenagers' opinions of technology and science. The survey of 500 teens indicated that they're optimistic about technology's potential to improve the world. They consider engineering to be the third most attractive career choice. And science? Not so much. From the MIT News Office:

The 2006 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index... found that a third of teens (33 percent) predict the demise of gasoline-powered cars by the year 2015. One in four teens (26 percent) expects compact discs to be obsolete within the next decade, and roughly another one in five (22 percent) predicts desktop computers will be a thing of the past.



Teens are also optimistic that new inventions and innovations will be able to solve important global issues, such as clean water (91 percent), world hunger (89 percent), disease eradication (88 percent), pollution reduction (84 percent) and energy conservation (82 percent)...


When asked to select the career field in which they are most interested, arts and medicine were teens' top choices (17 percent each). Teen girls were significantly more likely to be interested in medicine or health-care careers than teen boys (25 percent vs. 9 percent). Engineering was the third most-attractive career choice (14 percent of all respondents), but it was significantly more popular with teen boys than girls (24 percent vs. 4 percent). Only 9 percent of respondents chose science and only 8 percent chose business as their top career choices.

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(Via Boing Boing.)