Ongoing

• helping young people at risk of becoming early leavers to remain in education and training and qualify;
• helping early leavers to reintegrate into education or training and the labour market.

The grant is provided with the aim of balancing and encouraging brain circulation through returning researcher grants.

The Estonian state attaches importance both to international researchers coming to Estonia to work and to the return of Estonian researchers who have gone abroad to work, to facilitate the application of knowledge and experience acquired abroad in Estonia. In addition to balancing emigration, we contribute to ensuring the future growth of researchers and engineers.

During the summer holidays, we try to reach as many children as possible and motivate them to playfully learn the most necessary skills by organizing and conducting SUMMER LEGO CAMPS. LEGO® Education STEAM solutions support development through real projects. Its essence is the challenges taken from everyday life, their transfer into experiments and tasks, and the creation of connections between natural science subjects.

The LearnIT team wants to do their part in building a sustainable future and creating a better world that our children will inherit. We visited schools and kindergartens to provide space for the children of today to become the builders of tomorrow

We are currently preparing for cooperation with the EDULAB Academy, which is the official provider of innovative education based on the license issued by the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Slovak Republic.

Objectives

- We strive to support teachers in their everyday educational activities. We also aim to offer playful learning opportunities for different age groups with the help of our LEGO® Education programs as well as develop almost the entire range of cognitive abilities. And last but not least, we playfully teach children the basics of programming.
- The results achieved are assessed with the help of level assessment tests to be completed at the beginning and end of the school year, and in the case of camps, with the help of questionnaires filled out by parents.

The members of the SEER Network will work together to produce state of art knowledge on STE(A)M education,
collect pedagogical resources for teachers and schools, and collaborate to build the foundations
of the SEER Roadmaps.

The objectives of Together4STEM programme in 2023 are deployed into 2 Workstreams:

1. Strengthen business-education initiatives to inspire and empower young people in STEM

2. Ensure a smooth transition to work for current and future generations.

The 2 Workstreams aims respectively to: Learn, Share & Co-create:

• Amplify the impact of company STEM initiatives by developing a common methodology and share best practices

• Strengthen existing company STEM initiatives by exchanging knowledge and provide insights at EU level

  Pool Companies learning content for stronger impact:

• Pool together existing resources in the format of a website (e.g. STEM@Home) and

  written material to be disseminated (e.g. Climate Education Toolkit)

• Analyse educational perspectives and needs for online platforms by organizing

  Teacher Working Groups

  Local Collaboration:

• Build Local STEM Networks to organize school activities supported by the Climate

  Education Toolkit

• Gain knowledge on quality of materials by measuring impact through activities

  - How are they measured / what are the KPI’s?
  Before 2023: Outreach/visitors STEM@Home website, Downloads of the Climate Education Toolkit From 2023 on: Together 4 STEM will conduct an impact measurement after all activities organised under the 2023 plan. The survey will measure the impact and quality of the platform's materials and activities.

  - Do these objectives relate to a broader (government) strategy? If so, which one (link) and how?

• Pact for Youth: The aim of the European Pact for Youth was to improve partnerships

  between business and education to boost the chances of young people getting jobs. The Pact, initiated by CSR Europe is an appeal to business, social partners, education and training providers and other stakeholders to develop or consolidate partnerships in support of youth employability and inclusion. Together 4 STEM project emerged from this pact and will continue its legacy and serve as an example to build bridges between education and business.

• European Year of Youth 2022: In 2022 “Together 4 STEM Goes Green” was announced in May and launched its Climate Education Toolkit later in October. This initiative contributed directly to the objectives of the Year, namely

o To make young people aware of the opportunities provided by the green and digital transitions;

o To help young people become more engaged and active citizens;

• European Year of Skills 2023: The European Year of Youth mission remains a deployment point and continues to live on in the European Year of Skills 2023. Therefore, Together 4 STEM remains committed to this and the programme is oriented on the importance of

putting young people at the heart of this European Year, in order to bring about a change of mindset in lifelong learning and the further acquisition of STEM skills.

Emakumeak zientzian is a project promoted by POLYMAT (Basque Center for Macromolecular Design and Engineering) which was set up in 2017 in order to inspire science, technology and engineering vocations among girls and female adolescents, as well as to contributing to combat the gender stereotypes associated with research jobs. The project was launched on February 11 - the International Day of Women and Girls in Science – as a purely promotional activity. However, over time it has become a programme of STEAM activities aimed at different segments of the population and run by Polymat and a further 17 entities from the Basque scientific and technology ecosystem.

Currently the programme involves over 25 activities which are implemented annually. The majority of these activities are directly focused on inspiring science, technology and engineering vocations in girls and female adolescents and for them to aspire to careers in those areas, as well as to contributing to combatting gender stereotypes.

Emakumeak Zientzian’s accolades include:

• Gender perspective mention by STEAM EUSKADI.
• First place in the STEAM EUSKADI Awards.

The main objective of this initiative is to address the problem of gender inequality in the STEM field by introducing the gender perspective throughout the activities programme. In addition, the programme implements two specific STEAM education objectives:

• Inspire professional careers and vocations in STEM
• Improve students’ mathematic and scientific skills

Smartgene is an extracurricular private hobby school that consists of different extracurricular STEAM activities and classes for children in the kindergarten until classes 4-6, including robotics class, electronics class, science class, landscaping & architecture class, and “future skills class”. All the classes take place once a week.

Smartgene also organizes STEAM city camps during school vacations, aimed at children aged 7-13 years. The mission of Smartgene is to be a safe and instructive environment for children to learn STEM subjects through targeted games.

The objective of Smartgene is to encourage children to playfully solve real life everyday problems. Since the demand for STEAM proficiency increases in Estonia every year, Smartgene has developed extracurricular classes to introduce children at early ages science, robotics, and electronic areas. It's impact is measured by the number of kids participating in the extracurricular classes and camps.

The objectives are related to Estonia's broader government strategy to raise the popularity of science and IT as a career choice due to the fact that Estonia is facing a reality, where the demand for such professionals is higher than the supply. In addition, it is associated with the aim to develop a research-intensive economy.

The NPO Robotics programme aims to offer different learning and competition opportunities in robotics. The NPO Robotics has several different projects and outcomes and some of its programmes are connected to international initiatives and competitions:

• Competition RoboMiku - gives pupils the opportunity to build their own robot individually or in teams and put them to the test. The competition has different categories depending on the robot and age of the pupil
• First Lego League - a three-part robotics program meant for different age groups and based on that, have different difficulty levels. The aim is to popularize science and technology in a fun way. With that, other necessary skills and knowledge are being developed.
• School visits - workshops in robotics are offered to the interested schools. In one workshop, 20 students can participate. The necessary tools, equipment, robots and instructors are visiting schools all over Estonia
• Several projects that aim to promote robotics in pupils and teachers. They also offer additional training to teachers so that robotics would be a natural part of the curriculum.

The objective is to give young people practical knowledge about technology and robotics. The main focus is on practical knowledge and opportunity to work with technology that otherwise may not be available in schools. In addition, students have the opportunity to compete with each other.

The objectives are related to Estonia's broader government strategy to raise the popularity of engineering and technology as a career path. The aim is also to develop the STEM teachers so that the teaching quality would be high and the used methods modern and in compliance with the needs of the students.

The Mobile Bioclass project started in Estonia in 2014 with the aim to introduce the biosciences in Estonian schools. The programme brought the latest DNA testing and research methods to schools all over Estonia.

The Mobile Class project started originally in Lithuania by Thermo Fisher Scientific and has since been the main collaboration partner for the University of Tartu (project coordinator). Thermo Fisher Scientific is providing the project with laboratory tools and equipment ever since. The instructors of the programme are University of Tartu students mainly from science and technology faculty.

The main target group for the Mobile Bioclass is high school students. The project also aims to bring its programme to the smaller schools that otherwise do not have the possibilities to visit research laboratories and universities.

The programme lasts for about six hours and is for 24 students at the time with 6 instructors. The necessary tools for the programme are brought to the school from University of Tartu. The programme consists of a lecture (about four hours) and practical experiment (about two hours). The programme uses a DNA PCR analysis as its practical part to consolidate the theoretical knowledge.

The objective of the project is to popularize biosciences and introduce the modern methods for researching DNA and technology used in the biotechnology laboratories. As a result, the project increases the knowledge about the learning opportunities of biology and gene technology. The objective is to visit one school per week during a school year with the emphasis on smaller schools.

The objectives are measured by the number of schools the Mobile Class has visited and the number of kilometers traveled doing that.

The KVARK project was grown out of the Rocket69 science TV contest (see related page). The main reason for the creation was to broaden the public knowledge about science and scientific thinking. KVARK concentrates on three main actions:

1. Popularizing science, technology, and engineering
2. Rising the quality of the scientific, engineering, and technological education
3. Adding value to working in the science, technology, and engineering subject fields

The team of KVARK includes undergraduates and graduates from different STEM specialities.  KVARK’s objectives are to popularize scientific thinking and scientific approach in public by offering scientific content for different events, scientific entertainment in a form of science theatre, and by conducting clever workshops for both children and adults. KVARK also produces scientific and educational exhibits for museums and helps organisations to arrange projects that support science-based society, and environment.The objectives also include raising young people's (primary target group) interest in STEM education, professions, and careers in these fields. The objectives are measured by the projects supported; the number of events/workshops carried out. The indirect indication is evaluated based on the statistics of popularity of STEM specialties among the students’ enrolling universities, vocational schools, and hobby education.