POLAR STAR – Guiding the way towards STEAM through innovative learning approaches and contemporary science

POLAR STAR brings together state-of-the-art learning pedagogies and combines them with exciting activities that focus on contemporary science achievements around Arctic research and Space, thus helping teachers to introduce STEAM successfully in their class.

More specifically, the project team will combine innovative learning techniques like inquiry learning and the design thinking approach into one seamless “STEAM education” methodology. In addition, teachers will be introduced to the ‘Science as a whole’ interdisciplinary approach which facilitates the identification of connections between science disciplines and discover underlying connections between phenomena.

Finally, the POLAR STAR overall methodology will be delivered through a set of 10 activities around Space and Arctic research. Both areas are enormously interdisciplinary and exciting for students and thus make ideal vehicles to teach other sciences, very often considered less appealing, showcasing how such fields of research that might seem irrelevant to people’s needs have in fact a great impact on our lives.

POLAR STAR is essentially continuing the work of PLATON on interdisciplinary and inquiry learning, taking the methodology a step further by introducing the ‘Science as a whole’ approach for interdisciplinary learning and the ‘STEAM education’ approach for blending the different elements of STEAM into seamless learning episodes.