C Davenport Every term our team looks back on the work we have completed throughout the past few months and this blog will outline some of the work NUSTEM has completed since January. It’s been a short, but busy term. Since January we have completed 96 activities with over 2500 children, 300 parents and 200 teachers. In our partner primary schools we’ve been delivering three main workshops: The Entomologist, The Computer Programmer and The Mathematician. In the Entomologist workshop, Mel and Caitlin visited Year 4 classes. The children learned why we need insects to survive and what different ..read more

At the ASE conference last week, we launched our new research project called Supporting career-related learning in classrooms using STEM Person of the Week.   We are now looking for teachers and schools to take part in the research project and try out the NUSTEM STEM Person of the Week (SPOTW) resources. Teachers can work in primary or secondary schools anywhere in the UK. What are the possible benefits of taking part? Each school will recieve a free set of printed SPOTW posters for each class or teacher taking part, and a powerpoint presentation to support the use of the posters.  ..read more

This academic year, NUSTEM has been delivering three main workshops in primary school: The Geologist, Naval Architect, The Mathematician. We’ve also been running our annual Sixth form evening lectures as well. Since September we have completed 70 activities engaging over 2000 children, 200 parents and 250 teachers. For the Geologist workshop, year 3 classes came to visit the Think Lab here at Northumbria University. They have learned how rocks are formed, considered the attributes a geologist needs and what a career in geology might look like. This workshop has had a lot of positive feedback ..read more

With every new year, there is a time for looking back and planning ahead. The academic new year is the same.  Every year, the NUSTEM team spend time looking back at the work we have done over the past year, and plan our upcoming activities. Our annual report for 2022-23 outlines just some of the work that we’ve done over the past year. A key part of our work is to develop, deliver and enable high-quality STEM interventions for key stakeholders. This includes children and young people in 33 partner schools, their teachers and their families. The report describes some of the activities fo ..read more

We have worked together with the North East Local Enterprise Partnership (North East LEP) to produce a report, which calls for a nationwide approach to providing careers education in primary schools. Statutory guidance says only schools catering for pupils in Key Stage 3 (aged 11 to 14) and above need to offer careers education and guidance. However, research shows that children understand jobs exist from around the age of three or four and begin to form ideas about their futures when they are a young as five or six. For this project we joined forces with the North East LEP who had ..read more

This is a story about evaluation, why good evaluation can be really hard to achieve and what we wish we had known when we started out. NUSTEM was originally Think Physics, and we were set up in 2014 to develop and deliver a three year project with 15 primary and 15 secondary schools. The vision of that project was: To create a holistic widening participation and gender equality scheme based on partnership working that will lead to greater uptake of physics and related disciplines by children, and particularly girls, in the North East region. To build science capital in the North East region ..read more

Well. It’s happening. It’s taken us a while to really get geared up, but now suddenly dozens and dozens of Connected puppets are out in the world. Thanks to our new friends at Northumberland Libraries we’ve been out west to Haltwhistle, up north to Wooler, and a couple more schools roped themselves in for good measure. Over the next few weekends we’re absolutely ram-jam-packed with workshops. For future dates keep an eye on this bookings page at the Life Science Centre, they’ll be releasing more workshops very soon. Meanwhile – feast your eyes on these puppets! We’ve seen easter bunnies and k ..read more

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