BLOOM, partner of the biggest STEM campaign around the world!
Paving the way for a better, more equitable and more innovative landscape in STEM education: this is the challenge that BLOOM and other projects, organizations, schools and stakeholders have decided to take up by joining the 2020 STEM Discovery Campaign!
Led by Scientix, the community for science education in Europe, this international initiative invites partners and participants to promote careers and studies in the field by organising and supporting STEM-related activities!
Organized in the framework of the STEM Discovery Campaign, the BLOOM Stories Competition challenges teachers to find innovative ways to raise awareness about bioeconomy by using the materials available in the BLOOM School Box! From February to April 30, 2020, participants can join the competition in four different categories of submission:
- Teaching bioeconomy in primary schools (individual work);
- Teaching with bioeconomy in secondary schools‘ STEM classes (individual work);
- Integrating STEM teaching with bioeconomy (teams of two STEM teachers of different subjects);
- Integrating STEAM teaching with bioeconomy (teams of up to three teachers of different subjects, including at least one STEM teacher and at least one non-STEM teacher)
The winners of each category will be rewarded for their most innovative classroom implementation by being invited to a teacher training workshop in Brussels, with travel, accommodation and meals covered! As for the finalist entries, they will have the opportunity to be published on the School Network page of the BLOOM project!
About the STEM Discovery Campaign
With almost 1000 activities organised in 2019, the STEM Discovery Campaign aims to bring visibility to STEM initiatives organised at national and European level. But most importantly, the campaign gives the opportunity to practitioners to show and share their best stories on how Innovative Trends in Education can make STEM topics and career more accessible for more students!
Kicked off on the 1st of February, this year’s edition already counts 35 partners and 11 competitions organized all over Europe! The topics are numerous: from using bioeconomy as a way of raising students’ awareness of society’s big issues, to encouraging scientific understanding of real-world problems, there is a competition for all teachers of all subjects!
Curious to know more? Take a look at STEM Discovery Campaign activities‘ and actions‘ map and read all about participants’ activities on the STEM Discovery Campaign blog!
The Campaign in Times of Covid-19
In order to contribute to the collective efforts aiming at curbing the widespread of Covid-19, all partners of the 2020 STEM Discovery encourage everyone to consider, whenever possible, organising online events such as: learning scenario implementations, webinars, chats, discussion boards, quizzes etc.
As many countries close schools and some of them look more into online teaching, we would like to support all educators in finding out new, engaging ways of involving students in online activities.
The team behind the 2020 STEM Discovery Campaign and associated competitions will do its best to support teachers and schools in this challenging situation. We will provide regular updates with useful tips on how to work online and lists of online tools you can use to bring your classroom into the virtual environment!
On the BLOOM bioeconomy website, we offer free learning material, such as our repository, a searchable tool of bioeconomy and circular economy information and educational content, videos, virtual experiments, etc. Also free and available for all teachers, the BLOOM School Box is a collection of teaching resources which STEM educators can use to introduce the concept of bioeconomy. If you are looking for more online teaching and learning resources, you can also explore the Scientix Resource Repository for more ideas!
Despite the situation being unusual and challenging for educational institutions, we are convinced that now is the time to learn more about adapting schools to an online environment, testing new tools and developing digital skills of both teachers and pupils.
We are looking forward to reading your stories!
