|
University wins EU funding to encourage more girls into STEM career choices
The School of Education is the co-ordinator in ‘Girls into Global STEM’, a new EU Erasmus + project which aims to increase the number of school students, especially girls, who opt for STEM subjects and may subsequently pursue STEM based careers. Girls have consistently been under-represented in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and this project aims confront some of the factors that influence their choices both at school and in Higher Education. The project involves school, university and NGO partners from elsewhere in the UK plus Poland, Sweden and Cyprus and materials from the project will be available to other countries as the work evolves over the next 3 years. A key partner is Practical Action an international NGO that uses technology to challenge poverty in the developing world. Practical Action workers know that girls are especially motivated by working on STEM-based solutions to real world problems and much of the initial work of the project will be based around pupil-led ‘Global STEM challenges’ taking place in our partnership schools. The project will then move on to use the results of this work to construct a series of eBooks and other digital resources led by older students and supported by our university partners. This builds upon the world renowned expertise in the School of Education in mobile learning in the classroom but the project will also have important spin-offs for initial teacher education both in Hull and in the partner institutions. Other project outputs will include a teacher toolkit to include the global STEM challenges and material which will support teachers including curriculum mapping of the challenges; videos and guidance notes plus a teacher training programme which will be both face to face and on-line for pre-service and in-service teachers. The project will also generate a series of academic papers to share the learning based upon the results from the schools and on the linked methodologies of building digital resources. For more information contact the project co-ordinator Ray Kirtley ([email protected]) and see the project website: www.gigsproject.eu |
|