Abstract:

The shortage of skilled workers in the European Union is getting worse, especially the scientific and technical sector is concerned. According to the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop) there will be 2.7 million new jobs in the European STEM sector until 2025, but whether they can be filled with skilled workers remains more than questionable. In Germany the situation is particularly strained, as there are already 326,000 academics and skilled workers in this field missing. To fight this shortage, it is important to inspire young people to take jobs in the STEM sector. Therefore educational institutions, including elementary schools, play a crucial role by providing students the fundamental education they need to develop their skills, interest, and learning motivation in STEM. Accordingly, it is the job of elementary school teachers to get students excited about STEM. Therefore they need competencies in planning, conducting and evaluating problem-based and experiental lessons. These skills should be acquired during the education of STEM teachers for elementary schools. Yet in Germany, 40% of teachers who teach the subject of general knowledge and local history (including science, technology and computer science) at elementary schools do not have specialized qualifications for that purpose. Therefore the majority (53%) do not feel competent in designing science and technology lessons.

For this reason it is essential to also provide non-specialist teachers with subject-specific competencies from the STEM domain. In order to train this prospective pedagogical staff at elementary schools in these areas, the *anonymous* project was founded at the *anonymous*. In the course of the project a seminar was established, which is addressed to all students of elementary school teaching and aims to promote their skills in giving good lessons in informatics, science and technology (INT). The area of mathematics is deliberately neglected in this project, as it is not part of the curriculum of general knowledge and local history, but is a separate school subject in elementary school.

The seminar is divided into three parts: First there is an exploration phase, then a planning phase and finally an implementation phase. In the first phase the students are working together to explore INT phenomena in three different remote laboratories (RLs) in informatics, science and engineering. The RLs allow individual, self-directed execution and control of curriculum-related experiments controlled via a web-based GUI. In one of these RLs, for example, students can write short programs in the block-based programming language "Scratch", which they can load on an automatically punching press and observe its reactions via the GUI. In the second phase, they will plan and prepare workshops for children on one of the topics in the remote labs. They will conduct these prepared lessons with elementary school children in the final phase of the seminar. This phase will also include an evaluation of their courses.

The effectiveness of the seminar will be assessed through pre- and post-tests and the collection of data on the knowledge acquisition and the development of self-efficacy of the future teachers in relation to their skills in INT, in conducting experiments or solving problems. It also asks for their self assessment of their ability to provide good INT lessons. By using this instrument, the seminar can be evaluated and improved.

Keywords:

Training in elementary education, training educational staff, STEM education, remote labs, designing lessons, evaluation.