Title: Pushing STEM-education through a social-media-based contest format - experiences and lessons-learned from the H2020-project SciChallenge,
Abstract: Science education is a crucial issue with long-term impacts for Europe as the
low enrolment rates in the STEM-fields, including (natural) science,
technology, engineering and mathematics, will lead to a workforce problem in
research and development. In order to address this challenge, the EU-funded
research project SciChallenge (project.scichallenge.eu) aims to find a new way
for getting young people more interested in STEM. For this purpose, the project
developed and implemented a social-media-based STEM-contest for young people,
which aims at increasing the attractiveness of science education and careers
among 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 the
contest. The third section of the paper presents the idea, design and
implementation of the digital contest platform (www.scichallenge.eu), which
serves as the core of the challenge. The fourth part of the paper will provide
a status update on the contest pilot. It will provide a summary of the
experiences that the consortium made with this novel approach as well as the
main obstacles that the consortium was facing. The paper will conclude with a
preliminary reflection on the question if such an approach can help to increase
the interest of young people in STEM-education and careers.