With STEM and recently STE(A)M skills growing in demand, a lot of initiatives and programmes have been established at regional, national, and European levels to promote STEM studies and careers and to support teachers’ professional development. Many of the projects in this field have similar objectives, although they may use different approaches. We can all learn from their collective experience, as well as build synergies and potentially work together which will enhance our own efforts and bring better results.

Here are some of the projects that are currently being implemented or have just completed:

1. STEAMonEdu

STEAMonEdu – our project – aims to increase the adoption and impact of STE(A)M education by investing in the community of stakeholders and the professional development of educators. The project uses a bottom-up participatory approach to deliver

• an online community that will collect good practices and collaboratively develop STE(A)M education policies,
• STE(A)M education framework,
• STE(A)M competence framework,
• STE(A)M educator profile,
• MOOC targeting educators,
• self-assessment online tool and
• STEAM policy influencer kit.

The project is implemented during 2020-2021 by seven partners, coordinated by DAISSy Research Group – CTI. Our STEAMonEdu project is an Erasmus+ KA3  Support for Policy Peform project, and we are excited to collaborate with other KA3 projects in this area!

2. STE(A)M IT

STE(A)M IT – An interdisciplinary STEM approach connected to ALL around us, coordinated by European SchoolNet, impacts policy makers, teachers, school leaders, career advisors and industry, and aims to strengthen the educational landscape by promoting innovative and cross-disciplinary approaches to STE(A)M teaching in education. The outcomes to promote innovative integrated STE(A)M practices at school level include:

• Developing and testing the 1^st European integrated STE(A)M reference framework for policy makers and schools
• Providing training courses for primary and secondary school teachers and setting-up a network of career advisors at EU level
• Providing tools and guidelines for teachers and career advisors to help them promote current and future STEM jobs

This KA3 project started in November 2019 and will go for 3 years, till November 2022.

3. CHOICE

Choice project is about increasing young people’s motivation to choose STEM careers through an Innovative Cross-disciplinary STE(A)M approach to education. It aims to promote and improve STEM education at schools by designing innovative Open Educational Resources (OERs) collected in a MOOC that will increase the professional competences of teachers by equipping them with a STE(A)M approach of teaching.

The main outputs of CHOICE are easily transferable and implementable into different national contexts across Europe and beyond. More specifically they include:

• State of the Art study, Reflective practice case-study compendium, Framework for reforming STEM curricula & Comparative Piloting Analysis.
• Working guidelines “Non-formal education for promoting co-production of educational resources”, OERs & MOOC.
• Good practice tool CHOICE@SCHOOL, Policy recommendations.

It is a 36-month KA3 project (January 2020 – December 2022), coordinated by CESIE, Italy, with participation of Lifelong Learning Platform.

4. Towards a European STE(A)M platform

Another KA3 Support for Policy Reform project (2020-20222) aims to evolve the current EU STEM Coalition network into a full-fledged EU-level support centre for the national and regional STEM platforms as countries, regions and other stakeholders outside the network through a range of new and upscaled support actions, better EU-level (comparative) documentation and a new, more scalable decentralised structure of the network. ]

The project aims to respond to this challenge by strengthening and upscaling existing successful STE(A)M strategies (e.g. Dutch & Danish Technology Pacts) and kickstarting the ‘bottom-up’ development of new ones in Member States that do not yet have one in place. It will do so by:- Launching a “European STE(A)M platform”. Building on the existing EU STEM Coalition network, this platform will facilitate best practice sharing, provide direct support to governments and stakeholders in the development of new approaches and function as an EU-level expertise hub- Kickstarting the development of new strategies through a series of roundtables. These roundtables will identify national skills challenges and deliver country recommendations (taking into account how similar challenges are addressed in other Member States) and a ‘value proposition’, outlining how the EU STEM Coalition can support their implementation.

5. ATS STEM

Assessment of Transversal Skills in STEM (ATS STEM) project will create a live experiment where six countries will design STEM learning tasks, which are cross-curricular, so that students in lower secondary can have opportunities to develop a range of STEM competences. The project will develop STEM formative assessment strategies to support teachers customise their learning designs to better meet the needs of their students. The project will use constructive alignment to ensure the assessments are appropriate for the learning outcomes and that they support an active student-centred pedagogical approach. Digital technology will underpin and support these assessment strategies by providing teachers and students with data to enhance student learning.

This KA3 project is implemented during February 2019 – February 2022 by 12 partners from 8 countries, coordinated by Dublin City University (12 partners – 8 countries) 2019-2022.

6. Learn STEM

Main goal of Learn STEM – the European Alliance for Innovative STEM learning in schools to improve the quality and efficiency of STEM learning in secondary schools. Consequently Learn STEM aims at increasing the pupils’ interest in STEM and building STEM competences.

The results of the project are the Learn STEM Pedagogical Model, an ICT based training programme and an Inquiry learning package which are workable and possible to implement in different educational and non-educational contexts. All these contents have beeb integrated in an online learning environment – developed within the project – and offered as a free online course for secondary school teachers.

The project partners have developed several tools for the application of the model:

• The inquiry learning package;
• A checklist for The Learn STEM Pedagogical Model;
• Good Practice Examples of innovative STEM education and learning

Under the lead of the Open University of the Netherlands, Learn STEM project brings together 9 Partners from 6 European countries (NL, LT, IT, DE, PT, BE).

7. EuroSTEAM

The aim of the EuroSTEAM is to identify how we can use more interactive and creative teaching methodologies in our classrooms in order to excite and engage students in STEAM subjects.

The main outcomes of the project:

• STEAM Education in Europe Sept 2018 – a comparative analysis report which has identified shortcomings within the STEAM subjects and highlighted how we can introduce different learning methods into our classrooms to reduce these skills gaps in the future.
• STEAM camps In order to give educators a starting block for introducing these subjects in the classroom, the project partners have created 3 camps: Coding & Technology, Creativity & Logic, Contest & Challenges. These camps have been fully explained through resources and guides and are openly available.
• Online Toolkit can act as a library for educators throughout Europe to access if they need to run a STEAM based lesson or workshop within their classroom. This is open source and freely available to use for students and teachers.

Examples of other completed projects showcasing the advantages of STE(A)M approach can be found in this publication from School Education Gateway: STEAM Learning: European projects combining science and art.

First, Achilles Kameas of CTI presented our STEAMonEdu project and emphasised the importance and potential of collaboration and synergies among our three projects.

CHOICE project was presented by Chiara Venturella of the co-ordinating organisation CESIE. CHOICE, which has the same timeframe as our STEAMonEDU for 2020-2021, aims to promote and improve STEM education at schools by designing innovative Open Educational Resources (OERs) collected in a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that will increase the professional competences of teachers by equipping them with a STE(A)M approach of teaching.

The main outputs of CHOICE include:

• State of the Art study, Reflective practice case-study compendium, Framework for reforming STEM curricula & Comparative Piloting Analysis.

• Working guidelines “Non-formal education for promoting co-production of educational resources”, OERs & MOOC.

• Good practice tool CHOICE@SCHOOL, Policy recommendations.

Then Evita Tasiopoulou of European SchoolNet, coordinating organisation of the STE(A(M) IT, talked about their project, which started a bit earlier than the other two – in November 2019 and which already has had first results and is preparing to launch their MOOC.

STE(A)M IT project aims to strengthen the educational landscape by promoting innovative and cross-disciplinary approaches to STE(A)M teaching in education. The outcomes to promote innovative integrated STE(A)M practices at school level include:

So what do we have in common and what differentiates the three projects?

STEAMIT and STEAMonEdu both strive to define the competences of STE(A)M educators by investigating and engaging educators of formal and non-formal education. CHOICE differentiates by taking into account the needs of the students in STEM and STE(A)M Education and actively involves them along with educators in Creative Leadership Teams keeping them close to the labour market and STEM/STE(A)M career oriented approaches during the implementation of the project. Many common elements were also identified under our common goal, and partners discussed how the three projects complement each other. For example, all the three projects will create MOOCs, however, STEAMIT MOOC is aimed at  educators and starts in October of 2020, STEAMonEdu’s MOOC for educators is planned for 2021, and CHOICE MOOC will address students, so all interested  participants will be able to follow all of them.

We discussed the outcomes of our projects so far, our very first impressions regarding the future of policy reform in STE(A)M education, and our common findings regarding the continuously arising interest of all education professionals and policy makers across Europe.

We also had an extensive conversation on possible future synergies, potential collaboration, and how our projects complement each other something that unites us under the main common goal – to boost STEAM education!

We look forward to working together! Our highly regarded researchers’ team strongly believes that Team Work makes the Dream Work.

Jump with us,

                 let’s make this community larger,

                                       enroll to our platform,

                                                             join our vision!

You have a CHOICE to STEAMIT with STEAMonEdu!!!

Stay tuned – a lot of interesting things are being planned for the near future!

By RDWG and ALL DIGITAL

On 7-8 October 2020,  our project partner ALL DIGITAL, a pan-European association working in the field of digital inclusion and empowerment, will organise its 13^th annual summit ONLINE. The event is run in collaboration with ALL DIGITAL German members Helliwood – also a STEAMonEdu partner, JOBLINGE, and Digital Opportunities Foundation. It brings together representatives of networks and organisations working to enhance digital skills of European citizens.

ALL DIGITAL Summit 2020 is supported by the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy of the Federal Government of Germany, which has the Presidency of the European Union from 1 July to 31 December 2020. The German Government has made digital learning one of the key priorities for education and training during their EU Presidency.

The theme of the Summit is “Competences for the Future”, and keynotes, panels, lightning talks and workshops will be organised around these four topics:

• Towards a version 2.2 of DigComp > DIGCOMP
• The future of digital competence centres > FUTURE
• Recognition of digital competence certificates in Europe > CERTIFICATION
• Lessons learned during Covid-19 > LESSONS

Check the PROGRAMME to learn more about the sessions.

STEAMonEdu Project at the Summit

Our STEAMonEdu partnership will run a workshop «STE(A)M Education practices and competences» on 8 October. The aim of the workshop is to discuss the characteristics of STE(A)M Education good practices and the competences of STE(A)M educators. During the workshop,

• STEAMonEdu partners will give an overview of STE(A)M education and introduce characteristics of a STE(A)M education good practice;
• STE(A)M educators will share good practices that they have developed and used in the classroom; and
• for the first time the consortium will present the STE(A)M education competence framework.
• Participants will have the opportunity to discuss the presented STE(A)M education practice evaluation framework and the STE(A)M education competence framework.

How to participate?

Registration for the event is mandatory, please fill in the REGISTRATION FORM by 1 October 2020.

Summit website: summit.all-digital.org

On 7 October 2020, our STEAMonEDU partner – the pan-European association ALL DIGITAL announced the winners of their annual ALL DIGITAL Awards. The Awards recognize individuals and organisations across Europe that enable citizens to transform and enrich their lives through the benefits and opportunities created by digital technologies.

The categories have been changing from year to year, and recently three of the recurring ones have been: Best Digital Changemaker, Best e-Facilitator, and Best Digital Resource. Read about all the finalists of ALL DIGITAL Awards 2020

Best Digital Resource Category

A digital resource is an online product for educational benefit, contributing to enhancing digital skills or providing an organisation with a useful tool to use with the customers or by customers directly. It should be free to use and be sustainable beyond its development (or funded) period. Only ALL DIGITAL member organisations can nominate the resource, because the network want to highlight those resources that their members are using in their work and find it useful. The resource can be developed by an ALL DIGITAL member organisation; by a consortium within a project where a member organisation is a partner; or by an external company, if the member organisation uses it routinely within their training programmes. Examples include, but are not limited to: a self-assessment tool, an educational game, a serious of instructional videos, an online training course or MOOC.

The three finalists in the ‘Digital Resource’ category in 2020 are (you can see the nomination entries by clicking the titles):

• Connect Your City – by IASIS NGO, Greece
• Turtle Coding Box – by Helliwood, Germany
• Demo Bank – by Langas I Ateiti and Association of Lithuanian Banks, Lithuania

And the winner is ….

The winners were announce at the online Awards Ceremony on 7 October, which was organised at the ALL DIGITAL Summit 2020. Announcing the winner in the ‘Best Digital Resource category, the jury member Austeja Trinkunaite, Secretary General of Secretary General of CEPIS, the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies,  noted that ‘digital resources are essential in the digital training ecosystem. They provide the basis for building skills and competences for education and learning. And the need for high quality digital resources has become particularly prominent during the Covid-19 pandemic.’

… Turtle Coding Box by Helliwood!

With the Turtle Coding Box, ALL kids can learn how to code, regardless of social background, physical or mental abilities or disabilities. The resource provides:

• the coding app TurtleCoder with integrated assistive technologies for learners with disabilities
• the Turtle-Book as digital, interactive teaching resource with a complete curriculum for informatics basic education with 7 lesson plans, video-tutorials for teachers & students, task cards & working material
• selected material with Braille, special videos with sign language

What is unique about the resources is that both the didactic approach and the technology are designed for inclusive learning. Teachers are able to teach coding with very diverse learners within one group at the same time. Children with and without disabilities, highly gifted ones or with learning difficulties – for the first time ALL students code together with just one resource and foster digital skills together. This enables future opportunities!

Interested what Turtle Coding Box is? Continue reading the nomination and check this post on our website

Receiving the Award, project manager Jutta Schneider said, «The Award is particularly important because our vision is that all children learn how to code regardless of disabilities or not. This is our big vision and our heart.And it will help us spread this vision in Europe and promote it further in schools and other organisations that want to teach kids to code.»  Thomas Schmidt, CEO of Helliwood, added that in this work parents are also very important. «Children can learn coding at school, but then they can come home and code a little bit more. They can learn together with their parents.»

Watch the Awards Ceremony starting at 05:48:35, intro video about Turtle Coding Box – at 05:53:35

On the occasion of the ALL DIGITAL Summit 2020, on 8 October the STEAMonEdu project team organised a workshop within the thematic stream CERTIFICATION. The workshop STE(A)M Education Practices and Competences was mainly targeting teachers, trainers, educators, researchers in educational methods and techniques, educational authorities, policy-makers and institutions, to enhance knowledge and understanding of the project’s ambition and expected outreach.

The workshop was moderated by Prof. Achilles Kameas, in his twofold role of the Chair of the ALL DIGITAL Board and Scientific Coordinator of the STEAMonEdu project, with support from Katrin Schuberth of Helliwood and Tiziana Parretti of ALL DIGITAL. Representatives of all project partners contributed to the delivery of the workshop and spoke about different aspects of the project:

• Overview of the STEAMonEdu project – Achilles Kameas, HOU (Presentation)
• Basics of STE(A)M education – Spyros Papadakis, RDEWG (Presentation)
• Characteristics of a STE(A)M education good practice – Paolo Russo, SGI (Presentation)
• Towards a common understanding of a STE(A)M education practice evaluation framework (interactive session) – Gabriela Ford, EOS Romania (Presentation)
• STE(A)M education best practices – Paolo Russo, SGI & Esther Subias, COLECTIC (Presentation)
• STE(A)M education competence framework – Natalia Spyropoulou, HOU (Presentation)
• Towards a common understanding of a STE(A)M education  competence framework (interactive session) – Natalia Spyropoulou, HOU
• The STEAMonEdu community of STE(A)M educators – Esther Subias, COLECTIC (Presentation I and Presentation II)

The workshop alternated a series of front presentations delivered by scientific experts with successful video stories and best practices. The entire consortium was involved, delivering key information  ranging from the basic aspects of STE(A)M education to exploring competence-based tools, the STE(A)M education competence framework, principles and criteria to evaluate practices, policy instruments and key features to enhance transferability.

Particularly relevant was the opportunity to see the applicability of STE(A)M education. Project partners presented six best practices gathered from different Member States, showing the adoption of STE(A)M initiatives, to enable workshop participants to observe practical outcomes and shiny examples. The digital dimension of the workshop allowed the delivery of an extensive module, which was deemed crucial to maintain the attention high and on the spot, on STE(A)M Education and its potential in transnational integrated training programmes. As STE(A)M Education is practical, omni-comprehensive and based on a problem-oriented approach, it endeavours a social change, transferability of results and sustainable development, encouraging collaboration and a holistic approach to learning. The key message is to foster the coexistence and integration of different disciplines and contribute to the education of highly skilled professionals, able to tackle the growing challenges of continuously evolving business needs.

Among the successful stories, the Turtle Coding Box created by Aktion Mensch and implemented by our project partner Helliwood in Germany, was also presented. The product is a shiny example of the possible initiatives combining STE(A)M disciplines in educational projects addressing young target groups. The Turtle Coding Box received the ALL DIGITAL Award 2020 in the Best Digital Resource Category.

Would you like to be involved in the project activities? Join our STEAMonEdu Community!

The recordings of the Summit plenary sessions and other workshops are available on ALL DIGITAL YouTube Channel.

By ALL DIGITAL

ALL DIGITAL delivered one more compelling Capacity Building Session on 19 November 2020. Capacity Building sessions are a series of five 90-min workshops addressing various aspects of advocacy and policy making, with the participation of all project partners and both internal and external speakers. You can read about the first two sessions in this blog.

This third session was once again moderated by Renato Sabbadini, CEO of ALL DIGITAL. He presented local and regional policy-making environments and underlined the importance of interaction of those environments with advocacy dynamics.

The advocacy practice at local level was analyzed by Dr. Panagiotis Papadouris, member of the Research Team of the Regional Directorate of Education of Western Greece, coordinator of Educational Work in Greece, and Professor at Hellenic Open University. The participants had the chance to know in depth the advocacy strategy and different tools Regional Directorate of Education of Western Greece has utilized in the past for its Policy Recommendations.

Finally, Borut Cink, programme officer at ALL DIGITAL with many years of advocacy experience at national level, provided the participants with all practical steps to address local and regional governance, including the descriptive demonstration of the most successful tools and methods.

The STEAMonEdu project partners are getting one step closer to advocacy! Stay tuned for the next steps to come in the European Policy influencing.

By RDEWG

In order to develop the Policy Influence Toolkit, a series of five online capacity building sessions were organised by ALL DIGITAL for STEAMonEdu project partners. Each of the sessions focused on a different layer and scenario, with the purpose of supporting project partners to develop and consolidate their policy-making strategy and to ensure a transversal action across Member States involved in the action.

With these sessions, we tried to provide a clear insight on how the institutions operate and to define the role of each organisation in convincing their government and policy makers in the importance of our cause. The sessions were centred on concrete examples of advocacy strategies and described diverse tools tailored to different actors at various levels. They were all moderated by ALL DIGITAL’s CEO Renato Sabbadini and involved speakers from partner organisations and external experts.

We have already talked about the first three sessions in our blogs The Way to Advocacy and One step closer to successful advocacy.

The 4^th session on 3 December, was focused on effective advocacy practice to influence policy at national level. In the discussion with Pierluigi Vaglioni, Italian representative on the Working Group DELTA of DG EAC and public official at the Ministry of Education of the Italian Republic, participants learned about national policy-making environments and advocacy dynamics; some tools and approaches used at national level; and practical examples of national advocacy.

The 5^th, final, session on 10 December “Effective communication strategies” was devoted to the most important aspects of effective communication in policy-making – how to develop communication strategy for advocacy, how to create and communicate advocacy message(s), engage policy makers and key stakeholders, and organise awareness raising campaigns.

Valentin Dupouey, Head of Communications at European Green Party, gave a detailed presentation about Advocacy-Campaigns-Comms. Valentin talked about elements of successful campaigns and tips for advocacy with practical effective examples at European level.

Valentin’s engaging presentation was complemented by Ekaterina Clifford of ALL DIGITAL, who touched upon other aspects Communicating for advocacy with the focus on what ALL DIGITAL does in policy and advocacy, what STEAMonEdu consortium can do as a whole to influence policy, and what tools, channels, approaches each partner can use in their work to convince busy policy-makers and raise awareness among educators and general public about the importance and benefits of STE(A)M education.

STEAMonEdu consortium thanks all the speakers for sharing their expertise and hopes these sessions will support partners in their activities to ensure proper impact and further exploitation of project results.

By ALL DIGITAL

Our project partner ALL DIGITAL has just launched a new tool MyDigiSkills to help users understand their digital competences. It is based on the work done in the DigCompSAT project, as delivered by ALL DIGITAL for the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) in 2020.

The tool was launched on 23 March with an audience of over 100 people at the special webinar organised within All Digital Week 2021. Scroll down to watch the recording of the webinar.

MyDigiSkills is available in seven languages: English, Spanish, Italian, German, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Romanian. STEAMonEdu partner EOS Romania Foundation translated the tool into Romanian.

The tool is based on the European Digital Competence Framework for Citizens – DigComp 2.1, and it is anticipated that users will take around 20 minutes to complete the self-reflection assessment. The user will receive a personalised report on their digital competences that they can use to identify their strengths and weaknesses and identify the areas they could develop through training.

The webinar helped delegates understand the new MyDigiSkills.eu platform. It covered its history of development, rationale behind the tool, and provided in-depth coverage on how it works, its target audience, and potential uses.

Below you will see the webinar recording and the programme with timings in the video

PROGRAMME

Moderator – Ian Clifford, ALL DIGITAL

See the presentations from the event (all in one file)

3D printing refers to the process of additively building a three-dimensional physical object from a digital model data (Computer Aided Design or scanned object) file by depositing and forming successive layers of material under computer control.

“The disruptive nature of 3D printing” from the Digital Transformation Monitor from the European Commission (2017) reports that by 2021 the 3D printing market could be worth €9.6 billion. 3D printing presents new business opportunities as well as new entrepreneurial models based on transforming digital data into physical objects in remote locations, independent of centralized production and industrial areas by using “printing hubs”. 3D printing as a tool can also motivate, enable and empower with a greater impact on the wellbeing, fostering creativity innovation, DIY “maker mentality” that can be employed in both entrepreneurial and industrial settings.

It is an increasingly popular technology, and its application in education, especially in the STE(A)M education, is growing as well.

With 3D printers, industrial companies can produce customized objects with affordable prices, satisfying customers’ request in having a personalised product. At the same time, 3D printing technology, or Additive Manufacturing (AM), is a disruptive technology and approach to production thanks to the revolutionary design to fulfill social, geopolitical, demographic, and economic environment. Within this context, innovators, inventors and visionaries can produce their proposed designs, adding the artistic value to the STEM approach of 3D printing.

In education, 3D printing also means DIY approach, where students can explore their innovative instinct, experiment, and create with a STE(A)M approach.

3D printers can work with recycled plastic and with gel, especially for medical implants, and using this technology can introduce innovative approaches within education, especially with young targets. A good example would be the case from Pakistani Educational Institutes where the introduction of 3D printing technology has impacted both educators and students.

STEAMonEdu partner ALL DIGITAL participates in the 3D-Print project which is developing a training course for educators to promote employability and entrepreneurship within this innovative field.

In the 3D-Print project, partners have investigated the delivery of 3D-printing courses, outlining the adopted training approaches and the impact of the described learning courses and face-to-face workshops, to provide an overview of the pedagogic approaches that have been used for the teaching of 3D printing for teachers.

This desk research points out that most available 3D printing courses are offered in the form of MOOCs and (fee-based) short introductory courses and workshops by most vocational and higher education institutions (except for some classes on manufacturing technologies). It might be because 3D printing is not (yet) an established field of science and technology (such as robotics or mechatronics).

In terms of the pedagogical approach, online courses tend to rely on visual representations and videos primarily, whereas face-to-face courses adopt a more practical approach. And in the classroom, 3D printing fits neatly with STE(A)M education approaches.

Read a more comprehensive and detailed analysis and examples in the Desk research on pedagogic approaches for teaching 3D printing report to gain a full insight.

3D-PRINT partners are developing an entry-level, easily accessible course for adults to deliver training in 3D printing.

For the latest updates from the 3D-Print project, please check its website.

by ALL DIGITAL

Image by Zmorph