Welcome to the SteamCity platform

interdependent experimentation services dedicated to implementing inquiries in secondary education

Developing challenging and engaging science learning experiences

SteamCity is an Erasmus + project that started on September 1, 2022 under the coordination of the Laboratoire d'Aix-périmentation et de Bidouille, Fablab of Aix-en-Provence (France). It has been funded under the KA220-SCH call - Cooperative Partnerships in School Education for a period of 3 years.

The ambition of SteamCity is to help schools, teachers and students to adopt an inquiry-based approach to science education in the field of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Mathematics). STEAM education is an essential component of a learning continuum for all and develops active citizenship practices. Through the scientific process, human beings have the intellectual tools to become conscious and responsible actors in their relationship with the world and in the transformation of societies.

In concrete terms, SteamCity is an experimentation toolkit designed for secondary school teachers to implement these investigations in their subject area. Thus, these experiments will enable students to act as informed citizens by addressing societal and environmental issues related to their territory.

Acting on our environment through experimentation

The development of science and technology allows us to act on our immediate environment and experimentation is a crucial step in understanding these issues. Through SteamCity, students will be able to question their interactions with the territories and understand the different challenges at stake by using their analytical, critical and logical reasoning skills. The experiments carried out by the citizen students will collect and analyse data of scientific value, which distinguishes citizen science from awareness raising. Promoting genuine scientific inquiry in society is a challenge as it requires the recognition of complex scientific concepts. SteamCity combines the understanding of these concepts, as developed in the secondary school curriculum, with the investigation approach. While the project focuses on understanding sustainable practices, the aim is not only to raise awareness of these issues but also to enable teachers to address the associated scientific topics behind in an engaging way without obliterating the complex and transdisciplinary nature of the subject.

Providing inclusive STEAM experiences

Developing better learning experiences for students also means promoting inclusion. The challenge of equality in STEM education is crucial, as science fields still carry persistent gender stereotypes, not to mention unequal access to the resources needed to promote innovative learning practices. Contributing to the emergence of more inclusive educational models and environments is therefore a goal of SteamCity. Providing students with interdisciplinary experiences related to the societal challenges behind science topics can increase the willingness to learn while enhancing the sense of achievement in science. In addition, SteamCity is committed to providing low-cost technologies for schools and promoting partnerships between school stakeholders and the outreach community to create more flexibility in accessing digital technologies.

Expected results

The SteamCity project aims to develop and offer a set of interdependent experimentation services dedicated to implementing inquiries in secondary education, to approach the themes of smart and learning territories. The project has the ambition of promoting schools as incubators for citizen science empowering the students to mobilise their interdisciplinary knowledge in the frame of social, societal, and environmental challenges.

Concretly, the project results in tools and resources that can be directly applied in the classroom, providing teachers and students with access to inspiring and challenging learning practices. Specifically, these tools will include:

The creation of the SteamCity inquiry set, including the definition of a pedagogical framework and associated inquiry tools and resources promoting interdisciplinarity. They will be instantiated in 7 fields: governance and citizenship, environment and well-being, mobility, climate, biodiversity, energy savings, AI and technologies.
The creation of an experimentation service, enabling to tool teachers to transform schools in fields of experimentation thanks to several practices including programming, data collection and the use of sensors.
The development of a data display platform, that will enable gathering in one area all the results from experimentations handled all over Europe.

The implementation of these tools enables learners to understand the impact they can have on their environment through the development of their analytical skills, including creative problem-solving and computational thinking, key skills in preparing them for higher education.

What is an experimentation service?

Experimentation is the process of testing out new ideas or approaches. In the context of the classroom, experimenting helps develop challenging science learning experiences in which the students acquire the intellectual tools to become conscious and responsible actors in their relationship with the world. This approach aims to support the adoption of an inquiry-based approach to science education encouraging the development of meaningful experiences developing the critical mindset of the students as well as increasing their motivation and interest in STEAM topics.

Within SteamCity, we are offering an experimentation service in a territory context. Within urban areas, experimentation is often carried out in response to urban challenges such as mobility, waste, well-being, sustainability, or population size. Experimenting on a territory hence means that those proposed solutions can be prototyped, tested, and observed in a real-life setting. Thanks to SteamCity, the objective is to equip the students with open and accessible tools that will enable them to participate in territory experimentations, offering the opportunity to learn from their own successes and failures and share their achievements and results to empower the whole school community.

This open culture that we want to promote makes experimentation more accessible and useful to schools and classrooms but also to all the representatives of the territories, from the citizens to the companies, associations, and policymakers. To support this vision, SteamCity is offering experimentation services, to explore new ways of approaching science education while developing citizen science projects. This will include the exploration of ideas and data within territories in innovative ways including the deployment of sensors, the creation of new datasets, the exploration of existing data, the opening of new datasets made available by the schools to engage a larger community, the sharing of this data in efficient and open-mindset ways.

With the objective of encouraging people to act upon this information, creating citizen science governance solutions and feeling empowered in their learning experiences.

A project supported by a solid and interdisciplinary European Consortium

SteamCity promotes experimentation for understanding the challenges faced by our territories in terms of sustainability, to make informed choices as citizens of the world. This challenge is nowadays well shared at European and International levels, through cross-country initiatives, highlighting the need for tackling this challenge collaboratively. Hence, SteamCity is based on a solid partnership composed of 8 top-level EU partners in the field of innovative STEAM education, programming-based activities and sustainability. In addition to bringing expertise complementarity, this wide repartition of our partners on the EU territory will enable us to propose data comparison activities to children, between countries with different histories and policies on sustainability, environment, energy, social care, industrial development and favour the emergence of teachers' network across the EU for stimulating open-schooling approaches.