Abstract:

The heavily globalized economy requires STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) areas to face challenges regarding manufacturing, food production, health care, and so much more. Concerns regarding the low number of future professionals to fill STEM jobs resulted in a push for STEM education. Beyond integrating STEM disciplines, STEM education focuses on authentic content and real-world problems. The idea is to provide opportunities to a hands-on environment, while practicing and applying skills and knowledge. In this way, education practices include education discovery, driven from problem solving, cooperative learning, and subject integration.

Researchers argue that education shall be more student-centered and focusing on more hands-on learning experiences. Hands-on activities provide valuable opportunities to students immediately practice what they have learned. Moreover, hands-on activities aid students to gain confidence and an early understanding of how learning applies to real life. The importance of hands-on is irrefutable, but an open question is how to apply and conduct such activities in order to guarantee effectiveness in sparking STEM.

In this paper, we share our experience driven form a four-year project called ‘Women in STEM’, whose main goal is to present STEM to young girls and so incentive them to consider STEM careers in the future. The project is held in an Engineering institute in partnership with a global health-care company. We describe four distinct strategies to offer hands-on activities to our public, here named: ‘STEM in our institute’, ‘STEM in public spaces’, ‘STEM in schools’, and ‘STEM with replication in schools’. We detail the implementation of each strategy, discussing aspects as organization, workforce, and participants’ characteristics.

In ‘STEM in our institute’, we invite girls to come to our institute and perform hands-on activities with our students. Even though the participants are naturally STEM inspired by the fact of visiting our institute and the direct contact between our students and participants is motivating, gathering participants to these activities is the challenging part. With ‘STEM in public spaces’, our students offer hands-on activities for public that is visiting public spaces or events. This strategy has a complex organization, which is reduced when we combine our project with others initiatives. The public is most interested in expositions and rapid demonstrations, so we need to adapt our activities to this specific demand. A positive remark is the possibility to reach a larger public.

In ‘STEM in schools’, our students go to a given school and give the activity to children there. This strategy is simple to organize, since the school is responsible to invite participants. In ‘STEM with replication in schools’, we have a partnership with a team in a given school; we then teach the team how to perform the activities and later the team replicate such activities with other students. This strategy has a higher complexity in organization, since we need to identify schools with enthusiastic teachers to embrace the proposal. A positive aspect is that we empower the school with STEM activities, which can be reproduced indefinitely for distinct classes. According to our investigation, each strategy can be effective in stimulating STEM interest. We argue that a given strategy can be suitable to be implemented depending on the proposal and maturity of the project.

Keywords:

STEM, Education Strategy, Hands-on Activities.