When we use the term STEM for all, we think of making the use of educational technology and STEAM activities accessible to all students, regardless of their academic background. With this in mind, at the Blas Infante Secondary School in Cordoba, Spain, we always try to ensure that students with certain learning difficulties can participate in an integrated educational context in which the use of technology helps them to develop the skills necessary for any student and future worker in the 21st century.
In our school we work with a specific classroom for students with disabilities in order to facilitate their transition to working life in a kitchen-related occupation. These students are between 15 and 17 years old and during SDC22 they have been able to create a virtual tour of their place of work and study thanks to the virtual environment creation resource CoSpaces Edu.
In this activity they has described the different points of work in his kitchen-workshop and his classroom to share it with other students and their families. It has allowed them to explain different actions that they normally carry out on a day-to-day basis to show their work. This virtual creation workshop has been carried out in a total of 2 hours and has been shared with all the educational community of the School.
But the STEM for all approach offers us many more possibilities. It also allows students who have good STEM skills to create learning experiences to share it with their schoolmates, making the use of technology accessible to all students through a collaborative experience.
In this way, a group of upper secondary school students have coded the Maquenn robot with micro:bit to record times when passing through a circuit formed by 4 black marks on the floor. Programming has not been easy or very intuitive, so it is not a proper activity to carry out with groups of other levels. But having programmed this action, it has been possible for other students in the 2nd and 4th years of Secondary Education to use this robot to explore the representation of space and time in a uniform rectilinear movement and to calculate its speed. Thus, what for some students has been a programming practice, for others has become a physics and mathematics practice to calculate the speed of an MRU.
Obviously, the upper secondary students have been able to do the complete experiment: programming and calculating speed. This has been a very complete STEM practice. But it has also been possible to bring the use of educational robots for the study of movements to other students thanks to the collaboration. In addition, two of the students involved in the design of the activity have guided the development of the practice for other students.
This is another approach to STEM for all, an approach in which students themselves bring the use of technology through STEM practices to the student community
Presentation to carry out the project with students (Spanish version)