Developing a STEAM Roadmap for Science Education

The Institute of Digital Games is teaming up with the Department of Mathematics & Science Education, Faculty of Education (https://www.um.edu.mt/educ/dmse/) in the framework of the Road-STEAMer HORIZON project (Developing a STEAM Roadmap for Science Education in Horizon Europe (https://www.road-steamer.eu/).

The project kicked off in September 2022 with its inaugural project meeting in Brussels and is expected to be completed in August 2025.

The overall aim of the project is to develop a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) roadmap for science education in Europe. The roadmap will propose a plan of actions that will provide guidance to EU's key funding programme for research and innovation on how to encourage more interest in STEM through the use of artistic approaches involving creative thinking and applied arts (the "A" in "STEAM").

The University of Malta team is covering the Road-STEAMer aspects of science education and communication, STEAM related events and materials, and game-based learning.

Key activities of the project include:

• Collaboration and co-creation with the stakeholder communities of science education, research, innovation and creativity, through intensive exchange, dialogue and mutual learning among them which will produce better knowledge and shared understandings of the relevant opportunities, challenges and needs;
• A bottom-up approach emphasizing educational practice and practitioners' agency rather than high-level conceptualizations of STEAM and generic top-down plans for its adoption in science education; and
• A specific focus on ways to leverage the power of STEAM approaches, as manifested through exemplary cases and best practices, in order to enable a bridging of open science and open schooling mentalities and practices, which can catalyse an increased impact for science education as a crucial tool for addressing Europe’s current scientific and societal challenges.

The originality of Road-STEAMer resides in its overall approach to the development of the STEAM roadmap that will triangulate the knowledge gained from the stakeholder engagement, the analysis of the STEAM practices, and the analysis of the current educational policies, contexts and frameworks.

The Institute of Digital Games team is led by Prof Georgios Yannakakis (https://yannakakis.net), Director of the Institute of Digital Games and cofounder of modl.ai. Prof Yannakakis’ research is at the crossroads of artificial intelligence, computational creativity, affective computing, advanced game technology, and human-computer interaction. He is the co-author of the Artificial Intelligence and Games Textbook (gameaibook.org) and has received the award of Most Active Researcher at the Horizon 2020 Europe Awards event organised by the Malta Council of Science and Technology. He has been the General Chair of key conferences in the area of game artificial intelligence (IEEE CIG 2010) and games research (FDG 2013, FDG 2020).

The IDG team also includes Dr Iro Voulgari, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Digital Games, and teaching staff at the Department of Early Childhood Education, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. Her research focuses on digital games, game-based learning, game studies, and digital literacy. She is currently working on science learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) education through digital games.

For more information about the project and the consortium, visit: https://www.road-steamer.eu/ and https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101058405