Women in STEM
The project’s focus will be on several influential women in STEM who are both local to our students’ locations—Catalonia and Switzerland—and international.
Recently, The European Commission has launched their report on their approach on artificial intelligence: a comprehensive look at how Europe can best promote AI to open up new socioeconomic opportunities and create societal benefits for all Europeans and global citizens. They claim that modernizing Europe’s education systems and encouraging more young people to pursue digital careers is essential for ensuring that there will be enough ICT specialists who can boost Europe’s technological capacity and support the uptake of AI. In this context, encouraging more women to pursue STEM studies and careers must be a key priority if we are to prevent the current digital jobs gap from widening even further. UNESCO research has found that major educational obstacles remain to achieving full gender parity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professions. It is in this sense providing young students with female role models is a necessary step for encouraging the participation of women in STEM.
Students will be assigned these figures and will learn about each other’s local figures to engage in a cultural exchange. Gathering information about these figures, their historical context, and their major accomplishments will involve developing students’ research skills. This process will include lessons on how to conduct research and where to gather relevant and reliable information about these women and their contributions. As part of their research, students may possibly conduct interviews with the contemporary local figures and learn about the necessary steps to take in refining interview questions.
To develop students’ ICT competence and necessitate telecollaborative communication, students will work together to share their research about the figures and ultimately create a website featuring the information they have learned about them. Students will work asynchronously on separate aspects of the website and provide feedback to each other to create a cohesive website. This portion of the project synthesizes the research the students have conducted on these figures and will require lessons on how to build and design a unified website. Therefore, the project is multifaceted in that students are learning about notable women in STEM from around the globe while fostering research and technological skills.
Each group will have different objectives that will be complementary. Catalan students will learn the structure of a biographical text and some English vocabulary and grammar related to it, whilst the Swiss students will be focusing on the structure of these biographies for a website and adequate language register; they will share this info and provide feedback on the texts.