The aim of STEAM-Active was to design and implement a set of interdisciplinary and innovative teaching-learning sequences, tailored to the needs of higher education engineering students, in order to address underachievement and dropout and make them better prepared to respond to the expectations of the labour market. All this aims to make future workers capable of managing and applying knowledge, skills and competences from various disciplines to solve real and complex problems. STEAM-Active also aimed to contribute to tackle the inequalities in terms of female gender representation in scientific academic courses. For the purpose the specific objectives were: SO 1: Provide Universities with a complete methodological framework of STEAM based approaches and active teaching strategies to improve educational offer in STEM and engineering and tackle gender inequality SO 2: Provide university lecturers with STEAM based methodological approaches and teaching tools to answer to students lack in adapting their theoretical learning to a more practical, problem solving and interdisciplinary mind-set SO 3: Provide universities with consistent, re-usable and up-scalable Teaching-Learning Sequences based on the STEAM education methods
The motivation of STEAM-Active was deeply linked to the effects that technological evolution generates on companies and their constant need of innovating products, services and processes. STEAM-Active project was grounded on the consequential need of Higher Education to produce more meaningful STEAM learning, and engineering learning in particular, by reinforcing students’ preparedness to apply knowledge within real and problem based situation so to be able to meet market needs. Within this context the project identifies the following target groups: - University engineering teachers who need to reinforce their expertise on how to tackle low achievement in engeneering degrees and on how to promote vocations in STEAM with a special attention to gender inequalities - Engineering Students in need of an improved educational offer able to prevent underachievement and drop out and of a better capacity to adapt to the needs of the job market through a stronger link between theoretical learning and practical implementation - Women potentially interested in STEM studies and careers and who need teaching methodologies and study programmes more tailored to their strengths to prevent underrepresentation in engineering degrees and jobs.