SciChallenge: A Social Media Aware Platform for Contest-Based STEM Education and Motivation of Young Students

Scientific and technological innovations have become increasingly important as we face the benefits and challenges of both globalization and a knowledge-based economy. Still, enrolment rates in STEM degrees are low in many European countries and consequently there is a lack of adequately educated workforce in industries. We believe that this can be mainly attributed to pedagogical issues, such as the lack of engaging hands-on activities utilized for science and math education in middle and high schools. In this paper, we report our work in the SciChallenge European project, which aims at increasing the interest of pre-university students in STEM disciplines, through its distinguishing feature, the systematic use of social media for providing and evaluation of the student-generated content. A social media-aware contest and platform were thus developed and tested in a pan-European contest that attracted > 700 participants. The statistical analysis and results revealed that the platform and contest positively influenced participants STEM learning and motivation, while only the gender factor for the younger study group appeared to affect the outcomes (confidence level -- p < 0.05).