Technology in the classroom

Pupils in the Montseny school near Barcelona’s Parc Güell once a week leave their class­rooms to do ac­tiv­i­ties in one of the city’s green areas. One week they might find them­selves ex­per­i­ment­ing with build­ing an ant colony, while an­other might see them read­ing to bird­song. “We are a school of na­ture,” says the head of stud­ies, Mercè Barnés.

It is also a school com­mit­ted to sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy, and it freely uses ro­bot­ics to study the move­ment of the ants, or sen­sors to mea­sure the tem­per­a­ture in­side the ant colony. Tech­nol­ogy is also used in the class­room, in work­shops like one re­cently in which pupils built small ro­bots with Lego blocks to ex­per­i­ment with hot water and learn about con­den­sa­tion.

The Montseny school is part of the STEM­cat pro­gramme, a gov­ern­ment pro­ject aim­ing to pro­mote sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy, en­gi­neer­ing and math­e­mat­ics. “We joined STEM­cat to in­te­grate sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy into our na­ture pro­ject,” adds the head of stud­ies. The Montseny board con­sid­ers un­der­stand­ing how ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence works as im­por­tant as teach­ing the chil­dren about the re­spon­si­ble use of so­cial media and know­ing how to crit­i­cally se­lect in­for­ma­tion.

The trips out­side the class­room com­bine the use of dif­fer­ent tools, such as Scratch, Lego WeDo and Be­Bots, in ac­tiv­i­ties that the pupils re­cently showed off dur­ing the Sci­ence Con­gress, and in the city coun­cil’s Pe­tits Tal­ents Científics pro­gramme.

Last month, the Montseny school was cho­sen by the ed­u­ca­tion and the dig­i­tal pol­icy de­part­ments to pre­sent the gov­ern­ment’s STEM­cat pro­ject. Al­though the pro­ject first began in 2017, this year a new plan for the pro­ject was ap­proved aimed at pro­mot­ing the sub­jects of sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy, en­gi­neer­ing and math­e­mat­ics, or STEM as the group of dis­ci­plines are known.

With a num­ber of schools al­ready signed up to the pro­ject, STEM­cat comes out of the gov­ern­ment’s be­lief that the tech­nol­ogy sec­tor pro­vides ex­cel­lent job op­por­tu­ni­ties but is fail­ing to awaken enough in­ter­est in chil­dren at school. Ac­cord­ing to ed­u­ca­tion de­part­ment fig­ures, only 24% of pupils with a low socio-cul­tural level choose to study a STEM sub­ject, a fig­ure that drops to 20% among girls. It is a sit­u­a­tion that the gov­ern­ment wants to re­verse, and so it has set the ob­jec­tives of rais­ing the num­ber of pupils who study STEM sub­jects, im­prov­ing the gen­eral level of skills in these sub­jects, im­prov­ing co­or­di­na­tion be­tween the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem and com­pa­nies in the sec­tor, and fos­ter­ing the so­cial val­ues of sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy and maths.

To do that, schools need teach­ers with the nec­es­sary skills, and so the au­thor­i­ties have also cre­ated a spe­cific train­ing pro­gramme for teach­ers, while pro­vid­ing sup­port to schools that join. So far, 50 schools are par­tic­i­pat­ing, with a new op­por­tu­nity for more to sign up in March next year.

Schools in the pro­gramme will be given ma­te­ri­als and re­sources to help raise the skill lev­els of pupils, as well as a mod­i­fied eval­u­a­tion sys­tem to bet­ter test their STEM knowl­edge. The plan also fore­sees set­ting up co­or­di­na­tion be­tween the au­thor­i­ties, uni­ver­si­ties and the busi­ness world, and the cre­ation of men­tor­ing pro­grammes.

tech­nol­ogy