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

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and implementation of a social-media-based STEM contest by the EU-funded SciChallenge project, aiming to boost young people's interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education and careers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel social-media contest platform for STEM education and shares lessons learned from its pilot implementation to enhance youth engagement.

Findings

Positive engagement from young participants

Identified key obstacles in contest deployment

Preliminary evidence of increased interest in STEM

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.