The education system in Germany is still waiting for a reform and has to react ever faster to changes. The digital transformation brings with it immense challenges and opportunities for future learning and teaching. At the same time, the shortage of skilled workers is exacerbating this situation.
STEM education in particular can counteract the global challenges that today's children and young people are growing up with. Companies have shown that STEM skills contribute significantly to innovative strength and crisis resilience and are also linked to great opportunities for educational advancement. As a foundation, we want to use this program to show how STEM education can be successful and inspiring.
Getting young people interested in the STEM field in the long term is successful if it relates to their lives. Both inside and outside school, there are numerous opportunities to arouse interest in STEM subjects. We want to pick up on this initial interest and maintain it in the long term. For example, young women show great interest in the topic of climate protection (STEM Spring Report 2024, p.12). We want to promote the STEM skills of young people to enable them to find new solutions to known and upcoming challenges and to help shape the future in STEM professions. With our STEM offerings, we therefore focus on the areas of networking, talent development, study and career guidance, teacher development and science communication, whereby we set different priorities depending on the project. We aim to continuously develop our offerings on the basis of evaluations and to align new projects with empirically based needs.
"The shortage of teachers is a major threat to STEM literacy in Germany. If STEM subjects are regularly canceled or taught outside of the subject due to a lack of teachers, students' basic understanding of scientific or mathematical contexts falls by the wayside. A minimum level of scientific and technical literacy is a prerequisite for participating in public discourse - from climate change to vaccine development. The basis for this is a good STEM education - right from the start." (https://www.stiftung-kinder-forschen.de/presse/news/statement-zum-mint-report-2023/)
Based on this quote, we understand good STEM education to mean that young people develop a fundamental understanding of science so that they learn to recognize and understand scientific and mathematical-technical contexts. Such an understanding helps them to experience themselves as self-effective and to actively participate in public discourse. We also make use of innovative, unusual and creative science communication formats in order to spread scientific understanding and make STEM topics tangible for a larger target group.
If good pedagogical and didactic concepts are to be successful in STEM education at school, well-organized schools are needed where space is created for new ideas. This requires sufficient teacher capacity and the right equipment. At the same time, there needs to be flexibility in the curricula to enable interdisciplinary or project-oriented learning. However, a shortage of STEM teachers is foreseeable in the coming years. In conjunction with growing challenges for teaching staff, this will lead to a deterioration in the framework conditions for good STEM education in more and more schools. However, as has been known since the study by John Hattie (2013) at the latest, good teaching and therefore good learning depend significantly on the actions of the teacher. For example, according to the evaluation of the Dr. Hans Riegel specialist prizes, teachers are the strongest factor for participation in the competition. We see them as "talent discoverers" who recognize students' potential at an early stage. In this respect, our projects are intended to relieve, support and motivate teachers in order to ensure the quality of teaching in the STEM field. We want to help mitigate the predicted shortage of teachers.
Extracurricular learning locations offer comprehensive innovation potential that supports teachers and provides pupils with authentic learning approaches. We want to open up schools to external partners. This means breaking down rigid subject thinking, removing barriers to the use of extracurricular activities and developing lesson content based on the interdisciplinary everyday reality of pupils. STEM lessons should help pupils to make decisions on questions relevant to everyday life and weigh up options for action. Our projects therefore support the networking of stakeholders in the respective STEM education sector, so that these networks continue to develop after our involvement and offer added value to those involved.
Overall, our program always focuses on young people in secondary levels 1 & 2. We want to promote their STEM interests combined with STEM skills in order to contribute to personal development and stereotype-free study and career guidance. In order to support young people in the long term, we consider the transition from school to vocational or university STEM education and also promote interdisciplinary exchange, in-depth knowledge and networking between STEM research areas. Together with the Foundation's program areas "Early Childhood Education" & "Touch Tomorrow - Living & Working World of Tomorrow", the aim is to improve STEM education along the entire education chain and to inspire young people for STEM in such a sustainable way that they help shape the future as STEM specialists of tomorrow and take advantage of the opportunities offered by change.
