LET’S STEAM: An educative platform based on MakeCode, CircuitPython & Scratch for creativity and participatory sciences using IoT boards Erasmus Project

Project Title

LET’S STEAM: An educative platform based on MakeCode, CircuitPython & Scratch for creativity and participatory sciences using IoT boards

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 : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills; Pedagogy and didactics; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

STEAM represents a paradigm shift from traditional education philosophy, based on standardized evaluation, to a modern ideal which focuses on valuing the learning process as much as the results. It is expected that between 2017 and 2027, the jobs that will require STEAM skills and competences will grow by 13%. To tackle this challenge, schools in Europe must implement STEAM strategies and pedagogies to promote interdisciplinary and innovative initiatives within the classrooms. In the framework of the STEAM movement, many platforms and tools for education emerged to help the teachers from secondary and high schools to develop new contents and new skills to motivate the students to become more actors than attendees. This is the case of the platforms Scratch, MakeCode and CircuitPython. This trend is nowadays visible in all European countries and should be tackled at International scale. Of course since the creation of the tools, many changes and optimizations have been done. However, their potential is often not completely used or understood from the teachers that need to adapt their own pedagogical content and their lessons in order to use them. From this context, most of the teachers in secondary and high schools are not yet motivated or trained enough to catch their late back on the use of these platforms. Therefore there is an urgent need to interest the teachers in these forms of education to motivate them to provide new content and to create the best pedagogical method.

In this context, the LET’S STEAM project aims to enable the teachers to acquire knowledge on how to use programming opportunities to teach sciences in secondary schools students, in a way that code can provide inputs to a transdisciplinary approach of all sciences and art items thanks to creativity rather than focusing on hardware and technological project. Teachers are still teach coding with classic methods which are not relevant with the current world and its digital era, and is moreover most of the time adapted to very technical profiles, living some students behind, especially girls in the field of programming. Nowadays, we have to switch from learning how to code as an individual items, to teach what to use code for, to enhance creativity, innovation and promote active pedagogy between courses, between schools and towards the students. The main ambition of the LET’S STEAM project is hence to answer this challenge by enabling the teachers to create new knowledge and new educational contents by using the platforms and IoT boards towards an interdisciplinary approach of scientific topics at school.

To answer these ambitious objectives, the LET’S STEAM project will implement a several steps methodology:
1) Understanding the needs and the basic skills of the teachers in the framework of programming capabilities,
2) Gathering the requirements of the teachers to enrich the current open source programming platforms with accurate and tailored functionalities,
3) Creating a complete set of learning modules dedicated to a breakthrough Training of Teacher solution to enhance the skills of this target to become contributors of new pedagogies,
4) Ensuring motivation of the students and teachers by proposing some creative, transdisciplinary and collaborative projects in the scope of citizen science.

With LET’S STEAM, the aim is to think outside the box and to break the barriers between programming, creativity, and scientific items. The innovation potential of the project is then based on the pedagogical approach of programming for STEAM, by breaking the dissociation between subjects themselves such as scientific fields and art fields for instance, and moreover, by bringing new value to programming. The objective is not to use programming for technological items such as creating robots or doing algorithm, but to unveiled all its potential as support to understand concrete concepts, through data analysis for instance using sensors for physical studies, understanding what is studied and even being the source of the data collected directly by the students, and reusing these data in mathematics to make statistics on diverse societal subjects, bringing more motivation to young people through the feeling of being contributor of their own knowledge.

Regarding these ambitious program, each of LET’S STEAM partners’ bring a part of the expertise needed to analyse the teachers requirement. Thanks to these analyses, pedagogical and interactive content for ToT will be developed and then display during demonstration activities which will gather 90 teachers and implement it at school in order to reach up to 4500 students. The consortium aims to replicate the project in more and more schools at an international level. Moreover, the project results will be transferred to diverse other communities including libraries, associations for children, association for digital mediations, and interest of other teachers at lower and higher levels.

Project Website

http://www.lets-steam.eu

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 383246 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITE D’AIX MARSEILLE & Country: FR

Project Partners

• Laboratoire d’Aix-périmentation et de bidouille
• UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI
• Digitale Wolven vzw
• EVROPROJECT OOD
• ELLINOGERMANIKI AGOGI SCHOLI PANAGEA SAVVA AE
• UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI NAPOLI FEDERICO II
• Université Côte d’Azur