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

Men’s job, women’s job? – Job orientations are often challenging for young people and are carried with self-doubt, good or bad advice from adults, and taster offers, which are offered especially by companies and institutions that have high requirements for young people.

Since 2001, “Girls Day | Boys Day” is breaking typical stereotypes such as “This is only a job for men” or “Only women can do this” and changes the perspective towards a cliché-free job orientation. The day was initiated in 2001 and until 2010 it was for girls who should get the first insight into technical and scientific jobs. Since 2010, boys get the offer to get to know more about health and service jobs where men are underrepresented.

The aim of the day is to make job orientation easier for girls and boys and to get in touch with people who are against the typical stereotypes such as working as a woman in a “men’s job” and as a man in a “women’s job”. You can visit them in their daily work and question them directly and identify them as role models.

The annual Girls’Day has taken place in Germany since 2001. On this day, girls and women should get the motivation to try out technical and scientific jobs. Companies, organizations, and universities throughout Germany invite girls from the 5th grade and upwards to the Girls’Day who want to get to know the occupation. It highlights occupation training and courses of study in IT, crafts, sciences, and technology, in which women have been underrepresented so far so that girls can meet other female role models in leadership positions from business and politics. Through the day, the public becomes aware of the abilities of the girls, which opens new prospects for them and their future.

Boys’ Day has been decided since 2010 and in 2011 the first nationwide Boys’Day took place in Germany. Boys’Day follows the same purposes as Girls’ Day. On this day, boys get the opportunity to get to know jobs where women work in the majority. The aim is to support the cliché-free initiative and to establish a career and study choice free of gender clichés nationwide. There are a lot of job fields where male professionals and caregivers are searched for and are very welcome, for example in the field of social affairs, health, care, and education, especially where men are underrepresented.

Each year, Helliwood media & education participate at Girls Day and inspire girls for creative coding. This year we had the chance to present workshops for about 130 girls on April 22^nd. The TurtleCoder is a programming environment and with the help of a turtle, you get a first impression of programming. Programming plays an important role for the future in almost all professional fields with the use of computers and the Internet. With the motto “Everyone can code”, Helliwood media & education’s vision is that all children can learn to program, regardless of gender or disabilities. A major goal of Helliwood media & education is to spread this vision and to further encourage it in schools, companies, and other organizations.

By Helliwood

How we obtain information, shop, learn, communicate with each other, seek medical advice, or use public administration services – digitization is profoundly changing our everyday and professional lives. Everyone must be enabled to move confidently and securely, self-assuredly and self-determinedly in the digital world.

To this end, Germany’s digital association BITKOM established the annual Digitaltag, taking place on June 18th 2021.

The Digitaltag is a nationwide day of action designed to promote digital participation in society. On Digitaltag, various activities take place in Germany, such as seminars, workshops, open days and discussions on topics related to digitization. This is intended to discuss different aspects of digitization and make digital technologies understandable, tangible, and accessible to as many people in Germany as possible. Individuals, associations, companies, and public institutions can register actions and participate. Digitaltag was launched in 2019 by the “Digital for All” initiative and held for the first time on June 19, 2020, with over 1,400 actions registered. On the occasion of the Digitaltag, the initiative awards the prize for digital togetherness.

According to its own statements, the aim of the “Digital for All” initiative is to promote digital participation for all people and to accompany digitization trends with a cross-society dialogue. The initiative wants to ensure that all people find their way with digital technologies and in the digital space and are taken along with the developments. Therefore, on Digitaltag, people should be able to get in touch with digital solutions locally. In February 2021, the initiative published common guidelines for the promotion of digital participation. Accordingly, the initiative appeals for more participation of all social groups and more promotion of digital competencies and digital engagement.

To mark Digitaltag, the initiative is publishing a commissioned study on the topic of digital participation. The representative survey will map the attitudes toward digitization as well as the skills and use of digital technologies of more than 1,000 people over the age of 16.

Our project partner Helliwood media & education participated in the Digitaltag with digital and hybrid STE(A)M activities for teachers and students. Among other things, the event Einstein macht Schule located in Berlin was a great success. Here, renowned and young STEM scientists gave an insight into their fields of research to more than 300 students from secondary schools: Neurotechnology, textile design, space research and much more.

By Helliwood

Photo: @Helliwood, Christiane Herold

The handover of the funding certificates by Federal Education Minister Anja Karliczek on May 18 marked the start of the establishment of the central “MINTvernetzt” office. MINTvernetzt is intended to bring together the numerous initiatives and players working to promote STEM education in Germany and to pool research findings. In addition to the MINT clusters, another central project of the MINT action plan is thus entering the implementation phase. The Federal Ministery of Education is providing 12 million euros for a period of up to eight years to finance the STEM-networking-center.

“MINTvernetzt” is being set up by an alliance of the Körber Foundation, the National MINT Forum, the Stifterverband, matrix gGmbH and the Chair of School Education at the University of Regensburg. The associated office will be located in Hamburg.

“MINTvernetzt” for more effectiveness in STEM education

There are numerous initiatives and actors that are implementing projects to strengthen STEM education in Germany with great commitment. “MINT-Vernetzt” offers a common platform to all already active and future actors in STEM education. To share their knowledge, to network with other partners from science, business and politics, but also from school education. The knowledge gained is shared with the general public in the sense of an open innovation project. This results in new impulses, more sustainability and more effectiveness for STEM education.

Gender sensitization

“MINTvernetzt” also aims to support the realization of even better educational opportunities for children and young people, addressing more diverse target groups. One focus of the STEM-networking-center is therefore on gender sensitization, i.e. the targeted sensitization of STEM-activists and -engaged persons for the special needs of girls and young women. To this end, MINTvernetzt continues the networking of partners in the “National Pact for Women in STEM Professions” and develops the work further together with the partners.

Networking with STEM Clusters and STEM Research

The STEM-networking-center will also involve STEM clusters in its networking work. With around 40 STEM clusters, the Federal Ministery of Education is supporting the nationwide expansion of extracurricular STEM education opportunities for children and young people. 22 regional STEM alliances have already started their work. Details can be found at: The STEM Clusters.

MINTvernetzt also aims to promote the transfer between science and practice. With this in mind, the networking center will process findings from STEM research, which the Federal Ministery of Education is intensifying with further funding.

STEM E-Platform

MINTvernetzt will set up a demand-oriented e-platform to enable IT-supported networking of STEM actors and digital forms of collaboration. A STEM-Data-Lab within the e-platform will provide statistical data, studies and research results.

Source: Press Release, 18.05.2021 MINT-Vernetzungsstelle

Picture credits:

@ Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany

@ Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Deutschland

By Helliwood

MIN(K)T education in Europe at #KonfBD21

More than 1.400 educators and networkers from the German education landscape met online over three days from 10 to 12 November 2021 to take a close look at the current developments of digitisation within the German education system, to network and to discuss innovation. Especially the aspect of digital transformation occupied the stakeholders during the three-day event and so innovative topics such as attitude, activation of experiential spaces, change management and deeper learning in schools as well as the aspects for change in school education could be discussed in numerous sessions and in the livestream.

Equally the STEAMonEdu project also aims to qualify and empower educators for the digital transformation. This is what the results of the STEAMonEdu project stand for, which has produced numerous results in its two-year term (2020-2021) that promote the STE(A)M approach in (non)school education. The numerous results of the European project support policy makers and educators. In a workshop, the representatives of the German project partner Helliwood media & education worked out together with the participants the wealth of competences that STE(A)M educators should develop and train in order to successfully create contemporary educational offers.

4th Future Conference – STE(A)M Qualification of Educators

A further event, called the 4th Future Conference on the topic of STE(A)M qualification of pedagogues was held at a regional level as part of the German MINT Action Week on 25 November. The Helliwood media & education team welcomed networkers and teachers from the Berlin area who organise educational programmes in the STEM field and are actively involved in STEM networks. Dr. Anke Renger from the initiative junior1stein emphasised the STE(A)M approach, which needs to be expanded to reach more target groups and make science more interesting. The STEAMonEdu competence framework presented at the event supports the strategic approach to grant STE(A)M education attention also in the political context.

Learn more about the STE(A)M community and the next round of qualifications and MOOCs in spring 2022.