Short summarywww.teachstem.eu is an initiative developed under the ARTIFEX project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the EU. Its aim is to provide support and resources for STEM teachers to improve their practices and methodologies, further the specific STEM partnerships at schools and communities, and provide insights to policy makers with regard to the existing models and the challenges we all face in re-shaping our education and training systems and strengthening them with STEM-competences.Description.STEM is a very large field of work and exploration. With the ARTIFEX project and through the learning platform (see link above), the project attempts to help educators identify their personal strengths and weaknesses with regard to teaching STEM, and to assist them in improving their skills and competences by providing ready-to-use practical workshops. The learning platform offers the following components.Self-assessment tool for teachers and educatorsOur ARTIFEX SAT was built and tested by university researchers of Antwerp University and Karlstad University and it helps teachers and practitioners who wish to integrate STEM in their classes and workshops better understand their strengths and weaknesses with regard to teaching STEM in relation to the 21st Century Skills. Based on a short questionnaire, the tool will recommend personalized workshop scripts and instructions tailored to the specific competences and activity areas which an educator chooses to improve. This tool is available in different languages.WorkshopsDevelopers in Belgium (Stedelijk Onderwijs Antwerpen and Artevelde Hogeschool), Italy (H-Farm), Sweden (Karlstad University, teacher learning department), Greece (Ellinogermanika Agogi) have designed and tested a collection of STEM workshops. Each workshop comes with a set of instructions - difficulty level, group size, materials, activities, timing. All workshops were peer reviewed and tested on their impact by several dozen European schools. Their comments and additions have been included in the workshops as inspiring practices for their colleague teachers. STEM is a fun way for students to learn an important set of skills and be better prepared for their future workplace. With the help of the Assessment Tool and workshops, teachers can improve their competences. Best practices, some ideas for policy makersSuccessful STEM education typically requires cooperation between schools, teachers, students, local authorities and communities, and the business. The University of Antwerp has collected on www.teachstem.eu interesting cooperation models from different EU countries to help policy makers understand the variety of possibilities when designing STEM policies on a local or a regional level. InsightsRead what people who currently hold STEM-related occupations say about their work, their vision for the future of their jobs and sectors, and the challenges ahead for education. Or go to www.teachstem.eu to read about the ARTIFEX research. In a collaboration between the University of Antwerp and the University of Karlstad, Belgian and Swedish teachers were asked about their feelings of competence, and their concerns regarding working in a high-tech informal learning environment.ReachAll elements of the tool and project are freely available on the learning platform www.teachstem.eu

This proposal will address area b of the call "Maximizing the synergy of climate change research and innovation in Europe ". MAGICA maximizes the synergies between infrastructure investments and initiatives of climate change research and innovation across the European Research Area (ERA) by building upon and further implementing the Mission of JPI Climate in support to the international and European climate agenda (including the European Green Deal and Adaptation Strategy). MAGICA aims to accelerate the development, provision and exchange of knowledge from research and innovation to inform and support policy-making and climate actions via a better coordination of on-going and future initiatives and a more efficient use of resources. MAGICA will be based on a circular and iterative interactions among the strategic, scientific and societal components of climate change research and innovation. A scientific arena will be created to enhance the debate and discussion within the scientific community on climate R&I priorities, that will be synthesized in a Joint Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda on climate change for ERA 2025-2034. In addition, the creation of a regular forum with European Ministries of Research and Climate and other funding bodies will foster the coordination of the different national research policies in order to meet the ERA-wide priorities and needs identified by the scientific community. Finally, a multi-directional dialogue with different relevant social actors (from policy-makers to the younger generation) will be enhanced through different international conferences (e.g. ECCA, Climate Neutrality Forum), workshops and other innovative formats in order to inform citizens but also to detect the social needs concerning the transition to climate-neutrality and climate science. They will be incorporated into scientific community’s priorities for research, thus closing the feedback loop.

EXPAND will develop a toolbox for implementing ‘Challenge Based Idea Accelerators’ and run a first Idea Accelerator focused on homelessness.The toolbox is aimed at higher education teaching staff and will enable a practical new method responding to the need for more civic engagement, developing new problem solving skills and stimulate social entrepreneurship in students. The proposed project builds on the creativity of students combined with design thinking and challenge-based education to tackle societal challenges, with a focus on homelessness in the pilot programme. We call out for students, innovators, creative thinkers, tech people and the higher education world, in particular, to join forces and bring heavyweight social challenges in the spotlight. Our project aims to forge unlikely alliances across a wide spectrum of partners to define a viable, replicable and scalable methodology for tackling systemic societal problems.In this project, we will design a 4 month idea-accelerator with a strong focus on the needs analysis of the challenge in question resulting in a public demo day.The alliance will consist of business school teaching staff, design thinking experts, social enterprise leaders with expertise on how to tackle the issue and startup professionals. These different actors will work together in order to finetune the methods to the specific environment and challenge, in this case homelessness.

<< Objectives >>The project aims to develop a new Model Course designed in the format of the International Professional Standards for innovative educational leaders (AIEA-Supsi 2020) able to allow trainers to make a wide use of web-based simulation and active teaching methods using new tools, Hubs in order to perform effective teaching actions that could fit both lessons with physical presence-distance learning. LAILA contributes to the strengthening the digital transformation and multiple pathways to learning.<< Implementation >>The project include four main stages for 24 selected beneficiaries: the first one consists of comparing good practices about the application of web simulation based edu-teaching methods, analysing new digital tools on specific fields of application; the second one is the most productive and consists in developing a new Model Course involving the use of the agreed innovative educational leadership approaches that will be tested in the third stage and the results will be analysed and disseminated.<< Results >>The expected results are represented by the new Model Course and the recording of a effective interest in that products to be determined by stakeholders from other educational institutions also in other EU Countries, reached during the dissemination phase.In the testing stage it will be relevant to record a global achievement of the learning outcomes and awarding credits on the part of the learners because this would be the most demonstred performance of the effectiveness of the project's output