Abstract:

Interdisciplinary projects can support students in their creativity and challenge them in their academic knowledge. This leads to students that are more motivated and therefore higher achieving. Especially gifted students need these extra challenges to develop their full potential. Based on this research, a talent club for gifted students of primary schools, aged between 6 and 10 years, was designed at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. Participants in this talent club are challenged with interdisciplinary projects within the STEM fields that demand a variety of approaches to create curiosity and interest in science and research. In this club, students work in teams on creative ideas to improve their STEM skills and their ability to connect different fields to complete their projects successfully. This paper describes the background, the aims and the content of the Mini Talents Club at our university, as well as the comparison of qualitative feedback of students before and after they attended the club. The interviews show that the students’ view on computer science - especially about the value and advantages - changed from a very vague idea to specific examples of computer science impact and importance in everyday life. The expectations of computer science projects changed as well from very general ideas to the interest in solving specific problems using digital competencies. All in all the results revealed that the interdisciplinary projects in the talents club promoted the gifted students in their personal development and in their digital competencies.

Keywords:

Interdisciplinarity, gifted education, digital competences, creativity, STEM education, learning lab, Talents Club.