The objectives of the summer school are:

• To provide participants with knowledge for cultivating students’ spatial skills and organizing activities in and outside the classroom
• To raise awareness on the importance of enhancing spatial thinking, as well as on the benefits of environmental literacy of students in the shaping of the next generation of spatially and environmentally aware European citizens.
• To encourage new synergies between schools and academia for the development, implementation, and validation of hands-on activities.

Participating teachers will also be invited to be part of the GOSTEAM community to exchange and share ideas, experiences, concerns and educational resources with colleagues from all over Europe and beyond.

The GOSTEAM Summer School is designed so as to endorse teachers’ synergies in the field of fostering geospatial thinking.

During distinctive sessions presenting a variety of topics, participants will be encouraged to participate in the blending of geospatial activities with the STEAM element in an exceptional example of original interdisciplinarity applied. In the meantime, they will also become familiarized with useful ways, which will allow them to introduce such complex concepts in their class with confidence.

In this 6-day course, participants will be presented a detailed methodology for the design, implementation, and evaluation of educational hands-on STEAM activities for secondary education students, in the fields of Geographic Information Science and Technology, Cartography, and Environmental Science, which will be based on innovative approaches to STEAM, spatial thinking and environmental education, and their integrated cultivation within the curricula. Through mostly hands-on workshops, essential strategies for the development of an innovative learning approach towards effective combination of STEAM and spatial thinking will be introduced.

This website will act as a main hub of communication and for sharing and distributing preparatory material with the participants. Participants will have a common workspace for uploading and downloading educational materials.

Before coming to the summer school, participants will be asked to review some materials relative to the topic of the summer school and the methodologies that will be discussed.

Please find below the support material for the GOSTEAM Summer School Workshops:

1. Activity Template
2. Workshop I (Instructions)
3. Workshop II (Instructions and Data folder)
4. Workshop III (Data folder)
5. Workshop IV (Data folder)

As a follow-up to the training course, the participants will be asked to make use of the STEAM activities they worked on during the summer school and share their work.

In the meantime, participants in the GOSTEAM Summer School will become members of the wider GOSTEAM community and they will be interacting with teachers across Europe sharing the same interest. Moreover, they will stay updated with all the news in the field!