STEM education isn't about filling minds; it's about igniting them.
STEM education is a pedagogical innovation that responds to the challenges of the 21st century. "The Innovation for Teachers" project aims to disseminate STEM education in schools, contributing to the vision of equal opportunities for all students. The inspiration behind the project is the belief that you can create STEM learning environments even with the simplest materials. By creating complete instructional designs and free access tutorials, we support teachers to integrate STEM into the classroom as early as preschool and early school age.
Education for the 21st century
The challenges for education in the 21st century arise from changing conditions across the whole spectrum of human life, particularly from rapid developments in science and technology. For these reasons, current international educational standards place increased emphasis on mathematics, science, and computing, while promoting the empowerment of students with basic skills. The ability to solve problems, the development of skills and motivation for active learning, skills related to working in groups, and energetic and critical thinking are the ultimate requirements in a world constantly outgrowing itself.
In the face of these challenges, school education systematically fails, continuing to emphasize passive and mechanistic knowledge acquisition. Moreover, educational research shows that failure is even more in the critical fields of mathematics, science, and technology, a loss attributed to the de-skilled way they learn. This phenomenon, observed worldwide, has been a source of intense concern for decades among educators and researchers and in the field of education policy.
STEAM
Science – Technology – Engineering – Art - Mathematics
STEM approach often is called the education of the future, as it is developing in response to the challenges of the 21st century.
STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, reflecting the priorities emerging from contemporary international criteria. Instead, the term STEM conveys the need for an integrated interdisciplinary approach to these fields of knowledge, seeking authentic intersections between them. As an engineer must solve problems using mathematics, physics, and technology, STEM curricula draw on scientific practices and real-life situations that mobilize knowledge from distinct fields. In the direction of expanding interdisciplinarity, STEM education has incorporated art and design in recent years, adding an extra letter to the acronym (STEAM).
Experiential learning is an integral part of STEAM education. Students gain control over their learning by working to create an instrument, implement an experiment, or design a functional construction. If something is not working correctly, they are motivated to fix it, seek alternatives and ultimately find solutions. Through this learning process, students form meaningful understandings while developing strong motivation and valuable skills.
Starting from a young age
Research from the field of cognitive development highlights the importance of early childhood education for the emergence of critical cognitive skills and scientific reasoning. In addition, young children's education is essential to bridging social inequalities in education. However, curricula often reflect the belief that young children do not have the cognitive prerequisites to engage in scientific practices or problem-solving processes. Seeking to help fill this gap, the Innovation for Teachers project argues that the STEM approach should be central to preschool to early school-age education.