13 April — 09:00 – 13:00 CEST

STEAM education represents a paradigm shift from traditional education philosophy, based on standardized evaluation, to a modern ideal that focuses on valuing the learning process as much as the results. It is expected that between 2017 and 2027, the jobs that will require STEAM skills and competencies will grow by 13%. To tackle this challenge, schools in Europe must implement STEAM strategies and pedagogies to promote interdisciplinary and innovative initiatives within the classrooms. In the framework of the STEAM movement, many platforms and tools for education based on digital learning, programming and computational thinking have emerged to help the teachers to develop new contents and new skills to motivate the students to become more actors than attendees. This is the case of the programming learning platform, using block programming as a way to approach from simple to more complex digitally-based projects in secondary schools. This trend is nowadays visible in all European countries and should be tackled on an International scale. Even if since the creation of the tools, many changes and optimizations have been done, their full potential is often not completely used depending on the skills of the teaching ecosystem regarding computational thinking, computer sciences and programming competencies which is the main aim of the Let’s STEAM project.

Besides its goal of training teachers, Let’s STEAM is willing to provide a real opportunity to go further in creativity-based learning pedagogy and to enable using programming and the Internet of Things in a novel way, based on societal challenges and citizen science rather than through the only technical vision. Through Let’s STEAM, the objective will be to reconnect teachers and students with their capability to provide novel knowledge and results to the scientific and artistic community and to motivate them in the use of computational competencies in a broader way.

This webinar has been constructed to showcase the Let’s STEAM mindset through the deployment of a simulated project on MakeCode “Building a Cosy Classroom” working on two main measures: temperature and light intensity. The participants will be introduced to the general Let’s STEAM approach and will be able to co-create a project using the MakeCode resources. Brainstorming on equity and inclusiveness of the activity will be performed, facilitated by specialists in the field of gender equity and inclusion in technology-enhanced education.