roBOTics and STEM education for children and primary schools Erasmus Project

Project Title

roBOTics and STEM education for children and primary schools

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 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Natural sciences; Gender equality / equal opportunities

Project Summary

STEM programmes are receiving increasing attention, and decision makers are becoming interested since these approaches are considered efficient for developing scientific literacy and increasing scientific and technological vocations. However, what can be understood as an integrated STEM approach is not clear: many different conceptions of curriculum integration for STEM coexist; there are few teaching models ; the didactical guidelines are often not specific enough for teachers’ implementation; and most initiatives are addressed to teenagers, although recent research points out that while children at early ages often have an intrinsic interest in STEM content areas, it declines as they grow up. Therefore, pre-primary and primary education stages constitute great opportunity for smoothing the way. The ERASMUS+ project Robotics and STEM education for children and primary schools has its focus in early education (children four-eight y.o). The project outputs were specifically aimed to provide in and pre-service teachers in Childhood and Primary Education with a new didactical model and research-based and tested integrated STEM activities involving robotics. botSTEM aimed to support educators in finding ground-breaking ways to adapt to the continuously changing reality. During the three years of the project the partners have been committed in developing high quality outputs to ensure botSTEM attractiveness and the potential scale-up of its practices.
We developed a Toolkit, that won a prize at the Ciencia en acción 2019 competition, translated in 5 languages. It includes a new didactical model on a pedagogical basis and with methodologies for introducing STEM and computational thinking to young students; a selection of good practices in STEM education and robotics, produced and tested by teachers of different European countries; a group of new activities, designed within the model proposed, for developing STEM ideas and competences, making stepwise use of robotics, code learning, and physical Computation; and a selection of Open Educational Resources, useful for teachers wishing to introduce STEM approaches, collaborative inquiry teaching, code learning and programming. A free virtual learning platform, based on Moodle, was designed to help teachers to implement inclusive STEM + robotics practices for 4-8 y.o. The platform has educative videos, developed by the partners; complementary material, including guidelines for the assessment of STEM practices; an on-line quiz — the botSTEM Game, to delve into aspects of what scientists and engineers do in HTML5-compliant application, suitable for most smartphones and tablet devices– as well as different free STEM on-line games; guidelines to introduce role models strategies in science teaching to ensure visibility of women in science with biographies of women scientists and engineers from the partners’ countries; and the records of webinars developed during the project. This virtual learning platform is located at our website (https://www.botSTEM.eu/) where all the information and news about the project; the material produced; and recorded conferences can be found. The activities were implemented in schools of all the partners’ countries and studied in depth in Spain and Sweden, showing promising results in teachers and students. From these results, recommendations for stakeholders and for parents were produced in two different documents aimed to encourage scientific vocations already at early childhood education. Two events were organized. One in Verona, including conferences and workshops for researchers, teachers and students on 30th March 2019. The other, converted in an on-line event due to Covid 19 crisis, consisted in five talks, from 21st to 25th September 2020, given by renowned experts in STEM and robotics.
The number of subjects reached by dissemination and implementation activities is valuable and far exceeds the foreseen impact: Teachers, researchers, professors and professionals: 8310 (foreseen 2170); researchers: 537 ; Associations and schools: 930 (foreseen 5); Policy makers and Decision makers: 778 (foreseen 15) ; Children and Families: 20035 (4540); Civil society: 63802 (foreseen 3740); Online communication activities: 13291407.
The impact reached is high, in terms of participants and dissemination activities; results in schools; research developed (several final bachelor and master degree research projects; scientific publications and presentations in international conferences); and curricular modifications (introducing didactical strategies, from theoretical and practical perspectives, for integrated STEM, coding and inclusive robotics since early childhood) in the Bachelor degree of Pre-primary and Primary education at UBU and HKR preschools teachers’ programs. Finally, botSTEM model and practices inspired the writing of two KA3 Erasmus Plus projects for support of policy reform and one KA2 that have been funded by the European Commission.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 268469 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSIDAD DE BURGOS & Country: ES

Project Partners

• ADELE ROBOTS SOCIEDAD LIMITADA
• HOEGSKOLAN KRISTIANSTAD
• Polo Europeo della Conoscenza – IC Bosco Chiesanuova
• SENIOR EUROPA SOCIEDAD LIMITADA
• IDEODROMION