Let’s STEM together! Erasmus Project

Project Title

Let’s STEM together!

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Overcoming skills mismatches (basic/transversal); New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Pedagogy and didactics

Project Summary

STEM occupations are crucial for our society development and growth. However, in many parts of Europe, employers have difficulties in hiring people with the right STEM skills, particularly ICT professionals. Furthermore, statistics show how the percentage of girls opting for STEM studies is still worryingly low.

It is therefore particularly important to promote an integrated approach to science education, an increased attention to context-based issues and hands-on activities, a positive image related to STEM careers and the creation of effective partnership among European schools in order to face the common challenge and to optimize the results of the initiatives already implemented across Europe.

The project “Let’s STEM together” aims at achieving this goals, thanks to the collaboration of Primary schools based in Italy, UK, Cyprus, Greece and Hungary. Each partner will be in charge of deepening one of the fields that fall into the STEM acronym (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) and of elaborating engaging and effective activities to be shared with the teachers of the other schools.

The partners, after deepening their knowledge of the STEM approach and sharing the best practices in their countries, will realize and implement STEM lesson plans, that will include motivating and innovative activities to enhance the students’ results in science and foster their engagement and motivation. The lesson plans will be collected and published, and will constitute the main part of an open educational resource that will be widely disseminated. The OER will also include methodological guidelines, examples of good practices and a repository of digital resources that will be made available to many schools belonging to the partners’ network, so that dozens of teachers all over Europe will benefit from it.

With the cooperation of the English teachers, the students will be guided to the creation of an e-book called “women in science”: they will investigate and present stories of successful women in STEM, in order to create a positive model for female pupils and contribute to the elimination of gender-based stereotypes.

Furthermore, each school will organize a training course for the other partners in order to train them on the subject and methodology chosen. These trainings are the very core of the project and will contribute to the achievement of all the project objectives, as the teachers will be trained on the four STEM fields and will experiment and share innovative activities. Furthermore, in each mobility a relevant space will be given to learning activities for approaching the subjects in an integrated way, concept that is at the base of the STEM approach. For instance the partners will investigate the intersections between coding and maths education, or the role that ICT tools may have in studying and classifying natural phenomena.

The students involved will be aged 6-12, and will not only benefit from the experimentation of new methodologies carried out by their teachers, but will also have the chance to use the eTwinnning platform for cooperating with peers of other countries in carrying out STEM activities, by using English. This will contribute to foster their metacognitive ability, as they will have to reflect on the experiences made and report them to someone else. Finally, they will learn new topics from their international peers and will be likely to be curious and eager to apply them in the future.
The involvement of pupils will create a good simulation of an international scientific community, which will contribute to make the pupils understand important features of a scientist’s work and will therefore contribute to make STEM careers more attractive for them in the future.

Finally, each partner will involve in the project a scientific institution of their area, and will make the other partners visit it during the learning mobility. The institutions will be science museums, universities, planetariums, research centers, national parks, etc…
They will share with the partner schools their didactic approach to science and technology and may also realize learning experiences inside the schools with the pupils. This is very important because if we want to improve the students’ scientific literacy and therefore tackle the lack of STEM professionals in our society, we need an integrated approach with the educational and research institution of our regions.

Thanks to the completion of these activities students’ engagement will be favored, and their results in STEM subjects will be improved, reducing the results gap between primary and secondary education, more students will undertake scientific careers and the schools will potentiate their International dimension.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 117576 Eur

Project Coordinator

DD Santorso Fano & Country: IT

Project Partners

• AYIOS IOANNIS LEFCOSIAS PRIMARY SCHOOL
• Create Partnership Trust
• Ráckevei Árpád Fejedelem Általános Iskola
• 11th Primary School of Komotini