Designstem: integrated design + STEM education

"Design-intensive industries play a vital role in the EU economy. The European Commission aims to increase the use of design for innovation and growth across Europe; raise awareness of how design-driven innovation increases efficiency in public services and drives business growth; create capacity and competencies to deliver these policies (http://ec.europa.eu/growth/industry/innovation/policy/design/index_en.htm). Education and training play a fundamental role in achieving the ‘Europe 2020’ objectives. It is aimed at the internationalization of education and growing use of digital learning, supporting the creation of flexible learning pathways in line with learners' needs.The objective of DESIGNSTEM is to contribute to devising, building and disseminating work methods and resources for educators and learners in the fields of design and STEM; to support synergies between education, research and innovation activities, the digitisation of quality learning content and promoting the use of ICT as a driver for systemic change to increase the quality and relevance of open design and STEM education. The number of DesignSTEM participants was 10: the LUMA Centre of Helsinki University, Finland; University of Piraeus Research Centre (UPRC), Greece, Kuressaare Regional Training Centre; HMC College, The Netherlands; Tartu Art School, Estonia; Gutenbergschule, Germany; Middlesbrough College, UK; ITT Buonarroti-Pozzo, Italy; Polytechnic Institute of Braganca, Portugal; Faculty of Information Studies, Slovenia.Within 3 years, in 7 workshops, 10 educational organizations devised, designed and built Designstem - https://designstem.github.io/projects/ with ca 50 design and STEM concepts addressed inca 15 long-term integrated design and STEM e-learning projectscomposed of ca 75 short-term exercises and tasks for design and STEM lessonson an open source, no-sign-in, free web platform - Fachwerk - designed and coded specifically for creating interactive, user friendly, attractive e-learning objects, e.g dynamic mathematics, 3D models, generative design, VR-experiences and many other code-based interactive elements etc that can easily be changed, adapted and shared online includingca 100 interactive components for teachers and students to build custom-made projectsplus several interactive ""playgrounds"", where components can be mixed and matched and experimented withplus 5 popular code libraries accessible from the componentsplus a glossary of 150 design and STEM termsplus a colllection of 320 recommended design and STEM education web resourcesDesignSTEM is structured to have two technical layers. The ""lower layer"", the Fachwerk web framework supports a wide range of use cases, not limited to the scope of design / STEM e-learning objects. The ""upper layer"", DesignSTEM learning objects are technical demonstration of what is possible, but there are many additional features that the Fachwerk framework provides. For example, music education (the framework contains components for connecting musical instruments and sound generation), data visualization (with ability to bring in external datasources and transform them into a visual language), realtime communication (the learning objects can be connected to each other, providing peer-to-peer communication channels from and to anywhere), comprehensive suite of 3D graphics and VR, features to export learning objects as tangible 3D-printable objects and tools for teaching computer science topics such as data structures and state management."