Abstract:

Science education is tremendously shaping the present and future of modern societies. Thus, Europe needs all its talents to increase creativity and competitiveness. Especially young boys and girls have to be engaged to pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). However, statistics still show that enrolment rates in STEM-based degree programs are decreasing. On the long run, this will lead to a workforce problem in the research and development based economy as well as in the scientific sector of all EU member states. But how can we manage it to get young people more interested in STEM?

The EU-funded research project SciChallenge (project.scichallenge.eu) addresses this challenge by proposing a social-media-based STEM-contest for young people between 10 to 20 years. The contest pilot is currently running (until April 30th 2017). With its multi-level approach, SciChallenge aims at increasing the attractiveness of science education and careers among young girls and boys on a pan- European level.

In the first part, the paper introduces the project and highlights the main steps of the preparation of the contest. This includes the development of the contest concept and the processual framework as well as the main steps that were done for preparing the contest. It also presents the resources that are provided for the participants.

The second part of the paper highlights the idea, design and implementation of the digital contest platform (www.scichallenge.eu), which serves as the core of the contest. It will present for example the novel submission and rating system that utilize the power of social networking platforms such as Facebook, as well as the contest dashboards, a convenient, easy to use informational map for the users to observe the status of the contest and related information. Furthermore, it will show how intelligent social media syndication tools can support the awareness creation.

The third part of the paper will provide a status update on the currently running contest pilot. It will provide a summary of the experiences that the consortium made with this novel approach. It will also elaborate on the main obstacles the consortium was facing and present the lessons-learned for a future implementation, before drawing preliminary conclusions in the final part regarding the question if such an approach can be a way to increase interest of young people in STEM-education and careers.

Keywords:

STEM, Social media, education, contest.