Teaching STEM and STEAM together

<< Background >>Participating in the project teachers from the Applicant country have attended Erasmus+ courses on STEAM teaching and they wanted to apply their knowledge into practice and to share them on an international level. Both countries have already used ready-made STEAM kits and by this project initiation they accepted the challenge to design such activities on their own. By doing so, the Partners were able to match the activities not only to the curriculum, but also to students needs. From our experience in the past, schools and teachers acknowledge there is a real need of changing and adapt teaching methods and curricula, but they are given only theoretical framework and lack the practical know-how on how to implement that in their schools. By applying for this project, participating teachers were given a chance to compare their STEAM teaching activities to the ones of their colleagues from abroad and thus to estimate the real added value and effectiveness of the STEAM lessons. This project was initiated in order to help teachers from participating schools to understand what are the main challenges but especially the advantages of implementing such innovative activities as well as to share the results on an international level.<< Objectives >>The main goal of the project was to foster innovation within the classroom by using STEAM activities that introduce new approaches to teaching and learning methods while motivating and integrating kids into the future of technology.Specific Objectives were:•to develop innovative STEM/STEAM activities able to create an exciting and inclusive environment in the classrooms.•to implement these activities in the classroom.•to share teaching experience on an international level and create collaborative teaching environment•to analyze the impact of these learning activities across participating countries, considering the teachers’ effectiveness and motivation and the impact on students in terms of soft skills-building and motivation towards STEAM activities.By implementing this 6-months project, we wanted to help teachers from both participating schools to share the knowledge and skills related to curriculum based on STEAM activities and project-based learning methods. Both schools have some experience in participating in previous STEM-related projects, mainly through attending structured courses on STEM teaching and using ready-made STEM kits. The idea was to put knowledge into practice by designing own STEAM activities.<< Implementation >>We have implemented the following activities 1. Plan and design STEM and STEAM teaching activities (select the teachers, organise collaborative makerspace, agree on ways of communication and cooperation, define the curricula, create pedagogical content, design activities)2. Implement STEM teaching activities in PortugalThere was a total number of four 60-minutes long STEM teaching activities. Each activity was implemented by co-teaching teams. Each team consisted of two teachers (one from the Portugal and one from Bulgaria) 3. Implement STEAM teaching activities in BulgariaThere was a total number of six 60-minutes long STEAM teaching activities. Each activity was implemented by co-teaching teams. Each team consisted of two teachers (one from the Portugal and one from Bulgaria). 4. Analyse the resultsThe last phase of the project was to measure its impact and make an assessment of the achievement of the initially defined objectives. In this last phase the collected feedback was analyzed, partners agreed on suggestions for improving teaching activities, dissemination activities were organised to promote project results and to share the obtained results on an European level<< Results >>The concrete outputs of our projects are:•design of ten educational and inspirational STEM/STEAM teaching activities in strong collaboration of participating in the project countries•implementation of these ten STEM/STEAM teaching activities with the total number of 180 students (30 from Portugal and 150 from Bulgaria)•analysis of students’ feedback based on students’ surveys (after each lesson, participating students completed a survey)•publication of a booklet with the designed STEAM teaching activities;•organizing an online event to share project results on an international level;•design and maintenance of project website to disseminate project results;•the increased teaching capacity and improved professional skills of the participating in the project teachers from both countries due to the international teaching collaboration in the process of designing STEAM activities; •the improved 21st century students’ skills such as creativity, critical thinking, team-working abilities, communicative skills, skills to interpret and present information due to their participation in the organised STEAM teaching activities