SciChallenge: A Social Media Aware Platform for Contest-Based STEM Education and Motivation of Young Students
Date
2019Author
Achilleos, Achilleas P.Mettouris, Christos
Yeratziotis, Alexandros
Papadopoulos, George A.
Pllana, Sabri
Huber, Florian
Jäger, Bernhard
Leitner, Peter
Ocsovszky, Zsófia
Dinnyés, András
ISSN
1939-1382Source
IEEE Transactions on Learning TechnologiesVolume
12Issue
1Pages
98-111Google Scholar check
Metadata
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.05). Scientific and technological innovations have become increasingly important as we face the benefits and challenges of both globalization and a knowledge-based economy. Still, enrolment rates in STEM degrees are low in many European countries and consequently there is a lack of adequately educated workforce in industries. We believe that this can be mainly attributed to pedagogical issues, such as the lack of engaging hands-on activities utilized for science and math education in middle and high schools. In this paper, we report our work in the SciChallenge European project, which aims at increasing the interest of preuniversity students in STEM disciplines, through its distinguishing feature, the systematic use of social media for providing and evaluation of the student-generated content. A social media-aware contest and platform were thus developed and tested in a panEuropean contest that attracted >700 participants. The statistical analysis and results revealed that the platform and contest positively influenced participants STEM learning and motivation, while only the gender factor for the younger study group appeared to affect the outcomes (confidence level - p<