Abstract:

STEAM education seeks to develop in students a holistic way of thinking that allows them to arrive at much more efficient solutions, from a more global perspective as well as to reason, think critically, perform inquiry, collaborate, create and continuously search for improvement. These skills and new ways of thinking and interacting help students not only to understand the principles of the world around them, but also to be able to engage in their learning and put the knowledge into practice,creating solutions needed in their daily lives.

Aiming to create an easy to-follow and engaging STEAM approach to science education, the European POLAR STAR project (2019-1-FI01-KA201-060780) has designed a methodological proposal that guides teachers in the integration of STEAM education and interdisciplinary learning in an engaging student centered approach. The combination of these educational practices allows the development of key skills and competencies of students and helps them to increase knowledge retention and their ability to combine knowledge from different disciplines and apply it to new learning contexts.

STEAM education also seeks to make students aware of and appreciate the contribution of science and technology to the development of today's society. In this sense, POLAR STAR has developed a set of activities that follow the proposed STEAM approach and aim to bring students closer to science.e. This set of activities focuses on two main scientific areas, polar research and astronomy., two areas of great interest to students that are closely linked to our daily lives but often go unnoticed and are left out of the schools’ activities.However, they are areas of knowledge that are of great interest to students and that allow us to introduce several fundamental principles relevant to our daily lives.

POLAR STAR activities on polar research and astronomy show students how contemporary science and scientific achievements are directly linked to everyday life and science subjects taught in schools, while increasing their interest towards science. Some of the topics addressed in the activities are: gravitational waves, Solar System, permafrost, or auroral activity.

Currently several schools in Greece, Portugal, Poland, Finland, Cyprus and Spain are implementing the POLAR STAR methodology and activities. This paper presents the methodological approach of the POLAR STAR project and puts at the service of the educational community all the learning resources designed to promote STEAM education and interdisciplinary education in primary and secondary schools. The paper also shows the first evaluation results of the teachers who have participated in the first pilot implementation of the project.

Keywords:

STEAM education, inquiry, design thinking, 21st Century Skills, assessment.