STEAM pre-school academy

This kit focuses on STEAM education where students can explore and experience the world in a scientific way. Through interdisciplinary activities, little learners are encouraged to construct their own robots while reusing materials artistically.

They also design maps and communicate with their partners using storytelling as an interactive process to express their ideas and other elements of their story. Coding becomes a challenge of finding alternative routes and completing monthly missions with graded difficulty. Furthermore, educational robotics develop students' programming skills.

All the activities are fully integrated into the pre-school education curriculum and aim to provide young children with new knowledge while acquiring 21st century competences through a diverse range of learning opportunities with a holistic approach.

Objectives

Immersion into STEAM Education by performing creative activities to spark little learners’ lifelong love of the arts and sciences.
Connecting to real-world problems by using concepts and ideas from everyday life to bring reality into classroom.
Building computational thinking by increasing students’ attention in identifying abstract problems, while formulating solutions.
Coding and decoding by following or giving instructions.
Thinking in algorithms.
Programming robots.
Using storytelling to explore new approaches.
Combining STEAM education with environmental citizenship to promote respect for cultural heritage and participate in society as agents of change.
Gender inclusivity.
Using ICT tools to promote literacy, communication, and sharing.

Introduction of partners

At the beginning of the project, teachers share their interests using Padlet, an interactive wall used to support this task. Partner schools use a multimedia image (Thinglink) to present themselves formally, and present information about their organisation, their teams, and other relevant details. Pre-schoolers watch the produced materials and make comments.

Orientation

After the warm-up activities, the next step is creating a Google Slide presentation where educators add information about their education systems. This activity is defined as a STEAM learning exploration approach because teachers can find similarities and differences between their school curricula, define the goals, and organise the project activity plan. This way, the STEAM approach can be integrated into preschool education and applied to all areas of interest such as language, mathematics, art, technology, engineering, and science.

In the TwinSpace, teachers also exchange ideas and interesting articles, and other useful resources related to the project topic to refresh their knowledge and to get inspiration. They also jointly agree to use specific age-appropriate digital tools. In both tasks, TwinBoard is an easy tool to display all the necessary information.

These assignments support creating the project timeline and organising the activities in monthly missions and challenges while introducing STEAM subjects to facilitate the learning process.

Communication

Frequent communication and partner collaboration is important for implementing the activities and the quality of the outcomes. The gradual "building" of the project provides the partners with many opportunities for communication and contributes to creating a cooperative framework where teams can suggest ideas and undertake responsibilities.

COMMUNICATION

Communication between the schools ensures the continuation of the project activities and creates a positive climate between the members. TwinSpace provides a safe place where teams can maintain their connection. For example, the teachers bulletin, the chatroom, and the posts on the main page of the project allow teachers and pupils to follow the latest announcements. Nursery school teachers use instant messages on a daily basis, and young students take advantage of specific digital tools such as Colorillo to get into touch with their partners.

Collaboration

At the beginning of the project, partners jointly create the official logo of the project using Canva. Afterwards, they focus on the artistic construction of their robots with waste materials and give a voice to them via an online application (ChatterPix) to describe the character they represent and the materials they are made of. Their voice descriptions help students become familiar with each school's robot mascot and recognise them.

The next step is creating a story called "Our robots and their precious friends" with Storyjumper. In this story, the robots meet each other and natural and artificial elements (flowers, river lake, forest etc.) are added to assist designing the maps and presenting the story's algorithm, which consists of basic robotic movements that help the teams follow the same path. Then, the partner schools prepare ground and table maps that are decorated with the story elements. International teams use coding and decoding to exchange secret messages, using the binary code for example.

The final stage gives a new cooperative aspect in the project by connecting the STEAM approach with culture and educational robotics. The teams agree to represent a famous monument from their area and create guides with QR codes. At the end, the little learners add the new elements to their maps and programme their robots to find all the codes. The final presentation of the partnership is presented at a festival.

Evaluation & Assessment

The evaluation plan is based on particular criteria, which are set at the start of the project. This process has many forms, such as measuring objective achievement (goal-based evaluation), continuous feedback by analysing strong and weak points to adjust tasks (process-based evaluation), and examining the impact by focusing on the project's viability (outcome-based evaluation). Teachers use several methods like observation, discussion, description, and surveys etc. to collect the necessary information and comment on the results. Students practise self and peer-to-peer evaluation. Parents are also involved in this procedure by describing their level of satisfaction through an online questionnaire. As a result, the project follows a qualitative and quantitative analysis, which is presented in an eBook created with Issuu.

Follow up

DOCUMENTATION:

TwinSpace is a safe meeting place where the teams can post their activities, follow the announcements of the other members, share their ideas, and make comments. From the beginning of the project, schools use a project timeline as a guide to creating the structure of the activities and ensuring collaboration. For this reason, the private space is organised into central pages introducing the final outcomes of monthly activities and sub-pages presenting the teamwork. Each of them has precise descriptions to facilitate the documentation. Visitors can easily navigate between pages and find specific information. The final outcomes are presented in detail in an interactive image via Genially.

DISSEMINATION:

Promoting the project is very important as it helps partner schools attract their local communities. Each team can share the activities by:

arranging parents' meetings and festivals,
organising public events addressing the educational community (EU Code Week),
taking part in conferences or virtual seminars, and
publishing articles on school blogs.

Partners can therefore maximise the impact of their project by focusing on the target-groups and make their institutions centres for sharing good practices. Generally, the school being a place of continuous interaction between students, teachers, parents, and society has the greatest profit, as its members benefit in various ways: students acquire 21st century skills, teachers develop themselves professionally, and the bonds between the institutions and families are strengthened and schools become "open" to their local community. This project highlights the importance of pre-school education and gender inclusivity by empowering girls to be actively involved in the tasks and develop their talents in STEAM sectors.

Additional information

Age from:

4
Age to:

6
Difficulty:

Easy
Education type:

Early Childhood Education and Care
Target audience:

Student Teacher

Teacher

Teacher Educator
Target audience ISCED:

Early childhood education (ISCED 0)

STEAM pre-school academy

Additional information

School subjects

Key competences