Pushing STEM-education through a social-media-based contest format - experiences and lessons-learned from the H2020-project SciChallenge

摘要

Science education is a crucial issue with long-term impacts for Europe as thelow enrolment rates in the STEM-fields, including (natural) science,technology, engineering and mathematics, will lead to a workforce problem inresearch and development. In order to address this challenge, the EU-fundedresearch project SciChallenge (project.scichallenge.eu) aims to find a new wayfor getting young people more interested in STEM. For this purpose, the projectdeveloped and implemented a social-media-based STEM-contest for young people,which aims at increasing the attractiveness of science education and careersamong young people. In the first two parts, the paper reflects on the problem,introduces the project and highlights the main steps of the preparation of thecontest. The third section of the paper presents the idea, design andimplementation of the digital contest platform (www.scichallenge.eu), whichserves as the core of the challenge. The fourth part of the paper will providea status update on the contest pilot. It will provide a summary of theexperiences that the consortium made with this novel approach as well as themain obstacles that the consortium was facing. The paper will conclude with apreliminary reflection on the question if such an approach can help to increasethe interest of young people in STEM-education and careers.