Promoter – Thiago Luiz Mendes
Action – Stemcamp Escola de Tecnologia
Description – Stemcamp is an educational project that complements existing models with innovative pedagogical practices that make it possible to transform the future of children and adolescents through the teaching of technology and other essential skills for the future. In this project, two issues that cause profound negative impacts on the future of teenagers are especially resolved: the lack of knowledge in technology and computational language, and the difficulty in learning through new platforms.
It is based in Aveiro, in Ílhavo municipality, where they were recently accepted to start an incubation process at PCi – Centro de Tecnologia da Universidade de Aveiro.
They have been working since June/2020, where they hold 1-day Bootcamps teaching Programming, Robotics and Entrepreneurship practices to children from 7 to 15 years old. During this period, 63 children and adolescents participated in Aveiro, Ílhavo and Viana do Castelo. For December, there are 20 others enrolled.
In this format, each bootcamp can adopt a maximum of 12 students at a time, where they are separated into 3 islands of knowledge and everyone passes through all the islands. The topics covered in the Programming, Robotics and Entrepreneurship islands are connected so that students can perceive the empowerment that the use of technology provides for problem solving and how they enable the creation of new things.
Over the 6 months, a study was also carried out on how to circumvent the low interest of students in online classes, since parents and teachers perceived the low learning performance of students in this age group during the lockdown period.
A platform is developed for teaching STEM skills, where they test the performance of more than 1,000 classes with students, and reach a format in which students learn the content online, and even ask to take more classes.
This online platform is aimed at children and teenagers between 11 and 14 years old, consisting of 180 classes in 12 knowledge trails. Classes were transformed into challenges, teachers into youtubers, and the editions and communication standard are specific similar to the top market games, creating a real connection with teenagers to transmit transformative content.
They were able to empirically verify that adolescents who had never had contact with the programming, finish this program being able to create games and small applications on their own, in addition to awakening an entrepreneurial vision.
They also have weekly meetings with students via teleconference to keep them motivated to continue their technology studies.
The next steps, with the support of the incubation at University of Aveiro, is to take the Bootcamps project to places where programming teaching is more difficult to reach, and also to take the online platform to Portuguese-speaking countries.
More information at: https://www.stemcamp.fun/