STEM Discovery Week 2018 banner

 

Active Discoverers / The loudest YES to STEM!

STEM in Lithuania
Aleksej Perzu

The organiser contributed to the STEM Discovery Week campaign with six different activities in STEM education at his school in Lithuania, the Vilniaus Aleksandro Puškino mokykla. Those activities included both in-school and out-of-school events, in which students carried out practical field work in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics and informatics and learned from on-site researchers at Lithuanian universities and research institutions.

School's website Blog

School of small scientists Espiciencia
Bárbara de Aymerich Vadillo

The organiser contributed to six different activities in STEM education held in the region of Burgos, Spain, under the umbrellas of her school Espiciencia, the University of Burgos and Teatro Municipal Reina Sofía. Parents, teachers and school pupils took an active role in the activies, that ranged from a workshop, a seminar, a chat, exhibitions and a presentation of the book "12 experimentos para todas las edades", based on the organiser's school of small scientists, Espiciencia.

Espiciencia's website12 experimentosUniversity of BurgosBlog

Open Lab
Patricia Barciela

The Open Lab it is a place to wear a lab coat, take safety goggles and handle the instruments that scientists use in their everyday life, from pipettes to centrifuges, agitators to scales, pipes and much more. The organiser contributed to several workshops carried out in Spain in relation to the STEM Discovery Week, including biotechnological revolution, an investigation into HIV vaccine, development of medicines, artists of prehistory, the ExploreDomus School and live dissections of animal organs.

Museos Científicos CoruñesesBlog

Find your code, play and explore and say yes to STEM with Scientix and Go-Lab!
Tanja Olear Gojic

The organiser contributed to several activities in STEM education in Serbia in collaboration with the Mensa community, in which demonstrations were held for educators about the Scientix and Go-Lab learning platforms and children learned more about coding, electricity and magnetism through experimentation, simulation and game-based learning.

Blog

STEMagic
Umut Güzel

Two activities in Turkey were organised, inspired by Turkey's famous film director famous director Çağan Irmak's and his film called Whisper. Students made experiments with sound waves and optics, using also their knowledge of English and German languages, in which they made "Whispering dishes", created an infinite mirror with temperature and humidity sensors, and experimented with augmented reality. The learners connected online with experts at Gaziantep University, where they had the chance to test infra-red thermal cameras in their lab with the help of Skype.

School's websiteBlog

Hands-on workshops at the Kareas High School
Vasiliki Servou

The organiser carried out two workshops at the Kareas High School in Greece. First, a model of a a temperature alarm for egg incubators was constructed, in which temperature measurements were studied closely. Second, an electric circuit was constructed with micro:bit, fruits and other conductors of electricity to light up LEDs and adjust brightness levels and play notes on a buzzer or headphones.

School's websiteBlog

Learning sciences through practice
Voinea-Axinte Costica

During this activity, mathematics and physics teachers were introduced to a problem with practical applicability. The participating students gave other practical examples and then they debated about the theoretical applicability of the theme. The main objective of the activity was to improve students’ learning outcomes.

Blog

New Discoverers in the world of Scientix

Sub-category: Ambitious activities

Sunflower Buildings
Emine Yuksek

This lesson integrated games, arts and science activities through collaboration. Pictures related to sunflowers were examined and information about them provided. Then, the cooperative game was played.

Videos and photos

Means of transport and STEM
Estera Codreanu

This activity was planned over the course of four days and invited students to discuss different means of transportation on land, sea and in air. The lessons integrated elements of ecology, engineering, physics, geometry and mathematics.

Say Yes to STEM w 13 LO - Global Learning in the STEM Fields
Malgorzata Kulesza

This activity taught students how their classroom, their school and their community are all connected with the world and that they are citizens of the world. Developed in response to the International Decade for Action on ‘Water for Sustainable Development’ 2018-2028, the activity mobilised different actors and raised awareness about the subject of water and sanitation crises.

School's website

CODEMA GO
Mario Farpon Alvarez

CODEMA GO is an interdisciplinary and plurilingual project in biology and geology (1st grade secondary school) and bilingual technology (3rd grade secondary school). The idea for this name came from the world known game POKEMON GO. The main aim is at improving and learning curricular contents through virtual reality, based on cooperative work. In other words, learning through gaming.

School's blog

Light up your STEM star
Natalia Grushko

The title of this activity emphasised the importance of STEM-education for students, teachers and parents. Teachers learned how to motivate students to study and connect lessons with different fields of sciences, by creating conditions in which children can acquire the ability to use their knowledge to solve a wide range of tasks that are practical and personally significant.

Blog

Science Festival (SF)
Renata Sidoruk-Soloducha

The annual Science Festival (SF) in Prus, Poland, has been organised for several years. It is an excellent event that gives students an insight into the scientific world in an interesting convention, through various experiments, lectures and demonstrations in cooperation with the Warsaw University and the CSC.

School's websiteBlog

Happy PI Day
Vanya Parapunova

This was a celebration organised in relation to the annual International Pi Day, in which students were introduced to the history and application of constantPi. Students made posters, Pi-bracelets and Pi-martenitsy (traditional Bulgarian symbol in white and red color), to name a few. A competition and a dance were also organised in relation to the Pi number.

Science Marathon
Xenia Fosella

This was a travelling festival dedicated to science that was open to the public and to other school in Viareggio, Italy. The programme had an impressive range of interactive and playful activities for curious people of all ages over the course of three days.

Photo album

Sub-category: Discovering local STEM

Workshop of integrated science, mathematics and history lessons
Daiva Tamkuviene

During this workshop, students were introduced to the historical heritage of traditional Lithuanian ships called "Kurenas". Then, based on ideas in the fields of ecology and recycling, students tried to make their own prototypes for "Kurenas" by using plastic bottles with help of their mathematics teacher.

Say Yes to STEM and save the environment
Erviola Konomi

This activity was organised as part of a project and introduced students to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal #13, which encourages everyone to take urgent action to combat climate changes and its impacts. Students used experimental data, research techniques and information on how the climate affected human health and discussed how to build a more sustainable community.

STEM & IBSE in action: Earthquakes and engineering in the classroom
Georgios Chatzigeorgiou

This school activity demonstrated how communities could better resist earthquakes by designing anti-seismic buildings. Students constructed an earthquake-shaking table, models for earthquake resistant buildings and a simulator that demonstrated the relationship between earthquakes' power and ground level movements.

Blog

“Say yes to STEM for the Future!”
Lavinia Elena Orasanu

This activity invited students to participate in the 30th anniversary of a school's scientific magazine called ALPHA and its official website. The students were invited to read articles about some of the important scientific discoveries and inventions made by Romanian scientists in the past 100 years. The students then linked those role models to potential future careers and studies.

Our home town Birkirkara
Mariella Zikic

As part of this activity, each class explored different parts of its home town Birkirkara, including: The Aqueduct, the Old Railway, the Basilica of St Helen, the Windmill of Ganu and the March Band. The students worked together, which encouraged them to engage in a critical dialogue by exchanging ideas and discussing different ways to solve problems.

Sub-category: Girls in STEM

Launch of Loreto's Digital Leaders
Elaine Manton

The Loreto Grammar School Digital Leaders were formed by a core group of KS3 students who, along with a Spanish school, attended a recent school partnership exchange in Italy, called ‘In the Cloud’. The founding members of this exchange are Scientix ambassadors in their countries, United Kingdom, Italy and Spain. The Loreto Digital Leaders project develops students’ skills to make them better digital citizens, workers, makers, entrepreneurs and gamers to enhance their employability.

Erasmus+. SW. Women in Science. Restaurants App.
Inmaculada Ganan Cabezas

To foster the understanding of scientific vocations among girls, this activity facilitated the creation of a high quality movable and interactive banners' exhibition about scientific women, together with a “Smart Tree” of interactive cards with scientific women’s quotations. This included a cycle of lectures about women in STEM and other scientific issues. This activity was made in cooperation with the school Exposcience, which is held every spring.

Presentation

MINTGirls@JFG
Jorg Haas

MINTGirls@JFG were STEM-activities for girls focused on pupils in the last two years of primary school. Experiments were carried out within science labs, in addition to coding games and mathematical games. Students were also invited to participate in workshops about football and sewing.

Presentation

Ada Lovelace - The First Programmer
Mirela Radosevic

This activity was concerned with women's research in the field of science, especially focused on the work of Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer. The activity introduced participants to her life, education, work and her visionary ideas in relation to computer science. Students examined her algorithms and her ideas for computational thinking. Students created presentations, posters and web pages dedicated to women in science and presented their work to the public.

Event's website

Sub-category: Peer-to-peer discovery

It is cool to be STEM
Aleksandra Blazhevska

This was a five-day festival that featured 6 different workshops in STEM education, including the secrets of crystals, organs of the human body and their functionalities, the role of scientists, scientific careers, technology and pyrotechnics. On-site scientists in the field were invited to lead the workshops with students, thus supporting ideas of role models in the field.

Programação e Robótica
Anabela Santos

4th grade students organised and coordinated thematic workshops for other classes/students at their school, about Lightbot, Codemonkey, Roamer 2, mBot and mBlock. Students presented the apps and tools to younger students and supported them wile experimenting the provided resources on computers, iPads and cellphones.

School's blog

Academy of STEM

Desislava Apostolova

This academy started with an online course with a STEM curriculum. The students could enter a video competition about various experiments in the field of STEM. Students were then divided into groups by grades and perform STEM experiments independently, like separation of mixtures, determination of chemical reactions, planets, refraction of light and electricity.

Photo album

What are mathematics, science and engineering for in real life? STEM in some professional areas
Koldo Olascoaga Arrate

EASO Politeknikoa is a VET school that opened the doors of its laboratories and workshops to 150 children, aged 10 to 13, who were invited to take part in 14 different activities. Each school department prepared activities in different professional areas, particularly practical, where the use of STEM in daily life was demonstrated to students.

Blog

New methods and teaching strategies for STEM education
Mihaela Stan

The conference "New Methods and Teaching Strategies for STEM Education" promoted new methods and innovative strategies to increase pupils' interest in STEM subjects. It presented good practices in the implementation of new innovative strategies in the field of teaching and learning, organised a workshop for teachers about web 2.0 and other ICT tools, organised a peer-learning workshop for students and carried out a study on attitudes towards STEM at schools.

Video

STEM ‘E’ FOR ENGLISH
Ozgu Ozturk

Various STEM topics were studies as part of this activity during English classes in the 2017-2018 academic year and different activities carried out in relation to this. Based on the outcome of those activities, an exhibition was organised during the STEM Discovery Week to present the students' work.

Observation of Jupiter and The Moon by handmade telescopes
Mert Kocer

This school activity invited students to observe the sky - in particular the planet of Jupiter and The Moon - by using telescopes that were also designed and created by the students themselves.

Blog

ALL SUBMITTED ACTIVITIES

About the STEM Discovery Week and the competition

The peak of the third edition of the STEM Discovery Week STEM Discovery Week 2018 took place from 23 to 29 April 2018, with activities organised from February, 2018. This year, Scientix coordinated the campaign in collaboration with the SYSTEMIC project, which is funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, and the STEM Alliance, which is a private funded initiative, and counted on the additional support of our campaign partners, which brought originally together projects like PERFORM and STIMEY, in addition to 16 other projects in STEM education, with 38 organisations and 37 schools as official partners.

This third edition of the STEM Discovery Week is the largest ever held, which included:

  • over 800 activities organised,
  • in 40 countries across Europe and the world,
  • 201 blog posts published on the STEM Discovery Week blog, and,
  • more than 120,000 teachers, pupils and other people participating in activities.

Scientix is pleased to announce that it has now awarded 31 teachers who supported and organised activities directly in connection to the STEM Discovery Week campaign. All submitted activities were reviewed by a panel and the organisers of selected activities contacted for more information. 

The awarded teachers are invited to participate in the 23rd Science Projects Workshop at the Future Classroom Lab (SPW23), held in Brussels, Belgium, from 22 to 24 June 2018. This workshop is co-organised with the STEM Alliance initiative.

Selection process and criteria

All submitted activities eligible for the Scientix competition are divided into two main categories, namely 1. "Active discoverers: The loudest YES to STEM!" and 2. "New discoverers in the world of Scientix".

Furthermore, the second category of "New discoverers" has four sub-categories based on the type of and scope of the organised activities. Those are: 1. Ambitious activities 2. Discovering local STEM 3. Girls in STEM, and 4. Peer-to-peer discovery.

1. Active discoverers: The loudest YES to STEM!

Winners of this category were key to the success of this year’s STEM Discovery Week. They organised several activities, which were all represented on our map of activities. They worked hard to get their school community and local community involved in STEM. Even more than that: they encouraged and inspired others across Europe to join the STEM Discovery Week 2018, by highlighting their activities on the STEM Discovery Week 2018 Blog.

2. New discoverers in the world of Scientix

This category is divided into four categories that have the following selection criteria.

a) Ambitious activities

Ambitious activity organisers were outstanding in their outreach to their community, in their creativity and in promoting STEM through a wide range of activities. They collaborated with other STEM stakeholders, getting different perspectives involved in their pedagogy. Most notably, they used creative and innovative, but affordable methods to engage their students in STEM in the classroom.

b) Discovering local STEM

These activities engaged participants in gaining local knowledge as well as getting involved in STEM. Organisers offered an opportunity for students and other participants to develop their connection with their local context, thus gaining context-specific knowledge and skills through inspiring STEM activities.

c) Girls in STEM

These activities were organised throughout the STEM Discovery Week 2018 aiming to challenge gender stereotypes. They took a resourceful, captivating and creative step towards engaging girls and women in STEM activities and erasing the stigma that still hinders gender equality in STEM in our days.

d) Peer-to-peer discovery

These activities included an element of education that is known as an empowering pedagogical method: peer-to-peer activities. Students had an opportunity to teach their peers about STEM, present their findings, their knowledge and skills. The outstanding winners of this category encouraged their students to get involved in STEM on this deeper level and share their insights with other students.