The goal of the project was to strengthen values of sustainable development: reduce consumerism, care for pollution, conscious energy consumption, etc. and encourage more young people to participate in STEAM projects and activities, after the secondary education to choose science studies at colleges or universities. The other objective was to gain methodical knowledge of teaching sciences: types of pollution, how to apply this theme to biology, geography, mathematics and ethics classes. Another goal was to involve students into research studies, strengthen their learning to learn competences, develop their critical-thinking, creativity and problem solving competences. And the most important is to organize our gymnasium to become a sustainable institution as much as possible.
The gymnasium has been looking for effective ways to involve students in STEAM activities, which is the most complicated issue. Only few students choose sciences after they finish secondary education but for our country we need engineers, science graduates, etc. Ecology is one of the topical challenge at presents, so the topic and content were chosen for the project. This project has been devoted to develop school community's consciousness regarding environmental problems. While working on this topical issue the students have developed their creativity and responsibility for the global problems. The project activities aimed at encouraging young people to be confident and active participants in solving problems, searching for smart solutions and be emphatic to the environment. The teachers involved in the project activities developed their professional knowledge, shared their experience with the colleagues. They have applied new content and tools in their teaching processes as since last year we have had our STEAM lab, the visit to Comenius college has helped to establish the lab in the gymnasium and apply teaching/learning ideas for STEAM activities.