In September last year Carol and I had the pleasure of visiting lovely Uppsala in Sweden to attend the Frontiers in Education 2022 Conference and present the findings of our latest research. We presented papers on our two favourite topics attributes and aspirations: Carol on the self-identified attributes of STEM professionals, and me on the career aspirations and career motivations of very young children. I thought it might be useful to share the key findings from our research. ‘People Like Me’: Identifying personal attributes of STEM Professionals In this paper we asked STEM professionals t ..read more

Click to view slideshow. I’ve been a bit slow with the updates here, partly because we were busy finishing up our pilot workshop courses. We learned a lot from them, and families made some joyous robot puppets. Big thanks to everyone who came along and helped us out by testing all the bits which make Connect work. We now have some adjustments to make, of course, and if everything goes to plan we’ll be back over half term with our friends at the Life Science Centre.   The post Unleash the lion! (and octopus, cat, robot, …) appeared first on NUSTEM ..read more

Over the last few NUSTEM colleagues from NUSTEM have been working across the Faculty of Engineering and Environmental teaching on Foundation and Undergraduate courses. We’ve been helping students understand science communication and explored how to embed it into their educational practice. We’ve also been working closely with phd students on two of Northumbria’s Doctoral Training Partnerships: One Planet and RENU. This year we’ve been supporting students on Northumbria’s Engineering Foundation year. We’ve worked with them to develop their skills in science communication and engagement with you ..read more

Many years ago, when NUSTEM was still Think Physics, we developed an evaluation plan to look at the impact of the first three years. It was a lovely plan, which would use information from the National Pupil Database (NPD) and follow groups of young people as they took their A-levels and then their degrees. Sadly, as with all lovely stories, it didn’t quite work out as we planned. However, along the way, we learnt a number of useful lessons about evaluation and using the NPD, and thought that they might be helpful for other organisations interested in tracking the impact of STEM Engagement act ..read more

Connect is an Internet of Things digital making project, and it’s easy to assume that coding is the hard part. But if we’ve got Connect’s coding system right – and we don’t yet know if we have, but bear with me – then the most challenging part becomes the mechanism. We’ve known this for some time, but getting the programming system even close to right has been a battle. So we’re only now managing to turn our attention to mechanical engineering. Most of the time, we don’t have to think too much about how different mechanisms work. Yet simple mechanisms are a basic building block of mechan ..read more

It’s happening. It’s genuinely happening. More than that – it works! This half-term we’ve been testing out parts of Connect with some willing guinea pigs families at Battle Hill Primary School. There are a lot of hidden technical bits and some really quite shaky code involved in keeping Connect devices talking to each other (I’m allowed to say that, I wrote the code). We couldn’t quite be certain that once it met real people it would, you know, work. But it does. In the very first week one family made the dog in the picture above, which wags its tail when it’s happy and sags rather pathe ..read more

We know that children (and adults) often have a stereotypical view of scientists and people who work in STEM. Here at NUSTEM, we’ve created a simple resource which allows teachers to address these stereotypes with their students. STEM Person of the Week is a five week teacher-led activity. Each week the teacher ‘introduces’ a new STEM person to their class using postcards or posters. The teacher ask the children to think and talk about the attributes that the person on the poster shows. These attributes are chosen from NUSTEM’s 16 STEM attributes.  This helps the children to identify att ..read more

Many primary schools are exploring how they can encourage parents and carers to support their children’s learning. Research suggests that parental engagement is a strong indicator in children’s achievement. At NUSTEM we’ve developed ‘Engineering for Families’ to help with this. Engineering for Families is a six-week afterschool club which brings KS2 (7 -11) children and their parents and carers together to solve design challenges.  The challenges are built around five different areas of engineering, and can be carried out using very simple (and cheap) equipment. The club could be led by ..read more

Meet Zoe- a girl having a game of hide and seek with water. For our first session of the new school year, we discovered that water is everywhere and comes in many differnt forms. We also discovered that not everybody in the world has clean, safe water to drink. After the story, we tried to clean up some dirty water by making water filters using a plastic bottle and a coffee filter. For more detailed instructions, activities and a link to the story, go to our Water filters STEM at home page. The post Hey, Water! appeared first on NUSTEM ..read more

Diverse teams produce more creative and innovative solutions to problems.  Companies with diverse boards are more profitable. Products created by organisations which have limited diversity will be less useful.  For example, Apple didn’t include a period tracker in its Health app for iPhone until 2015. Many STEM sectors in the UK do not represent the diversity of the current UK population in terms of gender, ethnicity or social class.  In 2018 Engineering UK found that just 24% of  the Engineering workforce were people from a disadvantaged background, and in 2020 the ONS re ..read more