=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2709/paper107
|storemode=property
|title="Playful STEM-promotion": an Initiative to Encourage STEM Programs in Primary Schools
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2709/paper107.pdf
|volume=Vol-2709
|authors=Iyubanit Rodríguez,Michael Arias,Kattia Rodríguez,Laura Coto-Sarmiento,Marielos Murillo-Herrera
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/clei/RodriguezARCM20
}}
=="Playful STEM-promotion": an Initiative to Encourage STEM Programs in Primary Schools==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2709/paper107.pdf
“Playful STEM-promotion”: a Initiative to
Encourage STEM Programs in Primary Schools
Iyubanit Rodrı́guez1[0000−0003−0878−4076] , Michael Arias1[0000−0003−1014−342X] ,
Kattia Rodrı́guez2[0000−0002−7684−5769] ,
Laura Coto-Sarmiento3[0000−0001−5272−3380] , and
Marielos Murillo-Herrera2[0000−0001−6809−6780]
1
Department of Business Computer Science, Universidad de Costa Rica, Sede de
Occidente, Costa Rica
{iyubanit.rodriguezramirez, michael.arias c}@ucr.ac.cr
2
Software Engineering Department, Universidad Técnica Nacional, Alajuela, Costa
Rica {krodriguezb, mmurilloh}@utn.ac.cr
3
School of Computing Engineering, Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica, Cartago,
Costa Rica {lsarmiento@tec.ac.cr}
Abstract. Nowadays, studying in detail the gender situation in careers
in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) has been
fully encouraged. Despite the relevance of STEM disciplines around the
world, women continue to be underrepresented in STEM programs as
well as the lack of academic engagement for STEM education in primary
and secondary schools and universities. Whereby, there is a growing in-
terest in analyzing the gender gap and motivating both boys and girls
in primary education to participate equally in STEM careers. The aim
of this article is to collaborate and encourage strengthening the teaching
of STEM programs at earlier levels and to reduce the aforementioned
gap. To accomplish our goal, we present the design of an initiative called
Playful STEM-promotion to define a series of STEM-oriented activities in
primary schools focused on the gender variable. Preliminary results show
that we have proposed a methodology that will serve as a guide to de-
velop our initiative. A set of valuable learned lessons had been identified
as part of the experience of conducting a STEM-oriented inter-university
research.
Keywords: STEM · Gender · Primary school · Volunteering · Playful
1 Introduction
Disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (also known by
the acronym STEM) had become very trending among organizations and also in
scientific and technological fields. Women continue to be underrepresented in
programs related to STEM areas [10, 15], due to factors such as: cognitive ability,
work preferences, stereotypes, biases [30], lack of mentors and female role models,
unequal growth opportunities or gender pay gap [6].
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons
License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
It has been recognized that there is a lack of academic engagement in intro-
ductory STEM courses across high schools and universities [11]. In that matter,
the main focus of STEM education in primary and secondary schools has been
addressed towards more theoretical aspects instead of implementing practical
and experimental learning, where STEM disciplines might be encouraged in a
more adequate way [26]. This could be seen as a problem-based condition that
consider aspects such as: reduce the gap of having qualified professors to teach
STEM-based courses, and lead strategies that encourage a cohesive and gender
equity learning of STEM study topics. Additionally, being supported by role
models that are able to share their personal experience in their fields of science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics may positively inspire and attract
more children to study STEM programs. The existence of a gap regarding the
competences that children require and what is being taught is striking and raises
the need to optimize the preparation given to students so that they can better
perform their future professional position. Despite the importance of STEM ar-
eas at a global level, there is a tendency for efforts to develop activities focused
on promoting STEM programs to be carried out in high schools and universities,
or even in doctoral studies [13]. For instance, authors in [16] presented a study
that analyzed the role of the high school context for plans to major in STEM
areas. They highlighted two relevant aspects: (a) attend a school that provides
girls’ STEM orientations might reduce the gender gap; (b) gender segregation of
extracurricular activities have influence in establishing a plan to study a STEM
program.
Therefore, the objective of this work is to present the design of an initiative to
encourage boys and girls in primary education to participate equally in STEM-
related subjects. To achieve our goal, we proposed to design of a set of activities
in primary schools to promote STEM programs and we considered the design
of Case Study research to create our initiative called Playful STEM-promotion
focused on the gender variable. This paper describes the design of our initiative;
and as future work the initiative will be carried out in primary schools the next
year.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The related work is presented
in Section 2. The motivation behind this work is presented in Section 3. Section 4
describes the proposed initiative, including the planning process and Case Study
description. In Section 5, we describe and discuss our early lessons learned in
designing our initiative. Finally, Section 6 presents the conclusions and shows
future research topic.
2 Related work
This section initially focuses on difficulties that female students face when they
are in primary school. Later, some initiatives carried out in primary schools are
shown, which can minimize those difficulties and promote STEM programs.
2.1 Gender issues in primary schools
It has been shown that female students have been classified as deficient in sub-
jects of technology, science and mathematics. Therefore, studies have been car-
ried out to find out if there are gender differences in primary schools. A gender
issue is the relationship between teachers-students, e.g. a study analyzed the ef-
fect of teacher gender on primary school student outcomes (1,664 students from
17 schools), and found that female teacher has a negative impact on scores of
female students on the math test [1]. Following the same issue, quantity and
quality of teacher-student interactions were studied to know if there are differ-
ences between male and female students; this study had a sample of 590 hours
of videotaped classes from fourth grade students from 137 schools [3]. Results
show an imbalance in attention and interaction of teachers favoring male stu-
dents, and gender attention gap is correlated with lower scores in mathematics
for female students [3].
However, not only teacher-student relationship is a difficulty faced by female
students, also visual resources used in science education classes show gender bias.
It was determined that men are more represented than women in a scientific
profession, and teaching profession is represented mainly as women, indicating
a stereotypical representation in science education resources [14].
Likewise, another problem that has been investigated is the confidence of the
students in an exam, for example: a study with fourth grade students (439 stu-
dents) in primary school, found that female students report higher levels of test
anxiety than male students [2]. This result reflects the difficulties women face
in an evaluative environment where they doubt their ability to answer an exam,
then, teachers must be aware of this situation [2]. Therefore, teachers must open
new spaces in primary science classrooms, so girls grow up understanding that
science is an area in which they can participate [8]. Likewise, the school curricu-
lum in Costa Rica is still promoting and justifying the differential treatment of
people according to gender, producing serious implications in terms of personal
development [12].
2.2 Gender initiatives in primary schools
The belief that providing girls with access to primary and secondary educa-
tion automatically results in gender equality and the empowerment of women is
not uncommon [28], whereby researches have recommended strategies to address
gender equity in primary schools. One of the initiatives is to provide training
adapted to gender-sensitive teaching to avoid imposing stereotypes [9] e.g. Ger-
many launched a program to eradicate gender-based stereotypes in textbooks.
Likewise, Department of Education of Alberta, Canada has produced guidelines
to define reviewing educational resources to ensure that they promote gender
diversity, and Belgium provides tools and training programs to help teachers
eliminate gender stereotypes in their teaching practices [18].
A second initiative is to promote quality education, which allows boys and
girls to learn and participate in safety, develop identities, promote health, and
thus to have same economic, political and cultural opportunities [19]. The mes-
sages included in classroom activities should not be gender-based, for example:
in Bell School in UK a teacher teaches the topic of speed using a car that rolls
down a ramp (a male artifact), which created a semiotic assembly reinforcing
that this topic is recognized as a male activity. Otherwise, at Campbell School
in UK during a science class that has artifacts, such as batteries and light bulbs,
that can be considered male valency, the teacher orchestrated an environment
of autonomy. Children worked with friends, walked freely around the room, and
accessed texts when the whim took them. This freedom of movement positioned
children as legitimate participants in scientific activities [8].
Finally, the empowerment of girls must be accompanied by a change in the
community [29]. Prerna School is a school for girls in India, where teachers
actively advocate for girls’ rights within their communities through meetings,
parent dialogues, awareness rallies, among others [29].
However, in Latin America girls and young women, when they finish school,
have the idea that they are second-class citizens [20]. Education does not neces-
sarily lead to empowerment or gender equity; in consequence, the focus on pro-
cess, content and curricula must be critically addressed to eliminate inequitable
social norms [23]. Therefore, this paper is aimed at explaining in detail the de-
sign an initiative call “Playful STEM-promotion”. In this first paper we focus on
explaining the design of the initiative, since the implementation of the initiative
will take place next year.
3 What motivated to start the project?
The motivation for this project comes when authors from some universities in
Costa Rica talked about the small number of women in STEM programs. The
conversation focuses on what elements cause the low participation of women. It
is mentioned that the main problem is socio-cultural, since in Latin American
countries there is a preconceived idea about the role of women in society; which
is stigmatized through stereotypes, behaviors, language, lifestyles, among others.
Therefore, the idea of reaching out to primary school children is born, to min-
imize preconceived socio-cultural thinking about women and STEM programs.
Authors determined to create an initiative to promote STEM programs through
playful activities. Likewise, participation should be for both girls and boys, so
the message is the same for everyone.
4 Methodology
To design our initiative “Playful STEM-promotion” we used the research method-
ology Case Study, which is defined as the exploration of a real phenomenon
within its context through a variety of data sources [4]. This methodology helps
to explain the process and results by including quantitative and qualitative data,
which are used to collect and generate data with the triangulation of methods
and data [21]. In addition, it allows closeness between researchers and partici-
pants [4].
We selected this research methodology because it is a flexible process [5], since
it allows researchers to focus on the behaviors, attributes, actions and interac-
tions of the contemporary phenomenon within some real-life context [21, 31].
In our case, the research focuses on examining and describing the phenomenon
to design activities to promote STEM programs in the classrooms of primary
schools; mainly studying the gender variable.
We use guidelines provided in [22] to conduct a Case Study. We modify the
scheme to fit our project in six phases (see Figure 1).
Fig. 1. Phases to conduct our case study
4.1 Phase 1: Planning
In this phase, objectives and scope are defined. Likewise, researchers must deter-
mine the target social group and geographic area. To carry out this first phase,
weekly meetings were held virtually with research team.
Objectives regarding our research the following general objective was identi-
fied: Promote STEM programs to primary school children through playful activ-
ities, so they can consider STEM area in future decisions.
Secondary objectives emerged from the main objective. We defined the fol-
lowing ones:
a) Present basic STEM concepts, so that the context of STEM area is known.
b) Promote the development of STEM skills and capacities, where volunteers
can give back to the communities the knowledge that they have acquired.
c) Encourage boys and girls in STEM area through playful activities so they
can consider STEM area in future decisions.
Scope the initiative involves the design of a Case Study to encourage STEM
programs, for which activities to promote STEM area will be implemented in a
fun way through organized events. Activities will carried out in public schools,
specifically with students of fourth, fifth or sixth grade.
4.2 Phase 2: Stakeholders
In our research, volunteers are fundamental, they are who will carry out activ-
ities in public schools, as a meaningful way to contribute to their communities.
Volunteers are students of a STEM program in an university. An important aim
of this research is that volunteers can contribute to their primary schools (school
where they attended when they were children). Therefore, primary schools are
another stakeholder in our research.
To select volunteers and schools that will participate in this initiative we
use criteria sampling since in this type of sampling the selection of participants
must meet certain conditions or criteria, which are previously defined [17]. This
initiative has two important stakeholders: volunteers and primary schools, which
must meet a set of requirements to be candidates in this research. The following
inclusion criteria are proposed for choosing volunteers and schools.
Volunteer inclusion criteria: Volunteers will work with children and teachers,
whereby, it is important that they interact with them appropriately. A volun-
teer must have knowledge of the STEM area, providing guidance and support
during each activity, consequently, children should feel safe, integrated and even
with confidence to express their feelings. Additionally, a volunteer must have the
following skills: gender sensitivity, public speaking, communication skills, team-
work, being responsible and willing to contribute to the community (Figure 2).
Fig. 2. (a) Primary School inclusion criteria. (b) Volunteer inclusion criteria.
To evaluate these criteria, we propose a volunteer recruiting process, which
involves the following steps: (1) students enroll through an online form; (2)
students are called for an interview with at least one researcher; and (3) students
are accepted to participate as volunteers, if they meet inclusion criteria.
School inclusion criteria We establish a protocol that involves inclusion cri-
teria and different steps for the selection of primary schools where our Playfull
Stem-promotion initiative can be put into. If a volunteer wants that her/his pri-
mary school to be considered as a candidate, she/he must submit the school’s
information through an online form. In addition, the volunteer must attach a
letter of authorization from the school, which stipulates permission to carry out
the initiative in that educational center. After obtaining the list of candidate
schools, researchers will choose schools distributed throughout the country, to
carry out the initiative to different regions.
The inclusion criteria to select primary schools is presented (Figure 2):
1. The school must be public to include heterogeneous student groups.
2. The initiative includes activities that take place inside and outside the class-
room, so the school must provide a suitable place for that purpose.
3. Students (boys and girls) participating in the initiative must have the consent
of their parents.
4. The school must meet the following conditions:
a) A teacher in charge must be at the place where the activities are carried
out.
b) The group of students must be mixed (girls and boys).
c) The school must provide conditions so that students who require it can
carry out activities (e.g. support physical disabilities).
4.3 Phase 2: Case Study design
The Case Study is the main part of our initiative, since it is where we will work
with boys and girls of primary schools. The Case Study protocol includes phases
to design and develop STEM promotion activities in primary schools; researchers
defined four phases: training, activities, execution and reflection.
Training before conducting the training, researchers will create groups of vol-
unteers so each group meets the set of skills required to carry out events. The
number of volunteers per group is three. Each group of volunteers will be in
charge of activities in the previously selected schools. Training will be provided
to volunteers by the researchers. The training will last 6 hours in one day. The
topics that will be developed are: objectives, goals and scope of the research,
volunteer tasks, volunteer responsibilities, case study process, and soft skills to
use during the initiative. In addition, researchers will inform the school assigned
to each group of volunteers. Also, volunteer questions will be addressed and it
will be an activity for volunteers to meet and share.
Activities to prepare the design activities, researchers met virtually and deter-
mine that it includes two events. Each event will take place on different days.
The first event will work with girls and boys, and the second event will carry out
activities with girls only (girls from the first event). Furthermore, researchers
defined the objective and a list of requirements for each activity, this document
is called Volunteer Activity Guide.
In this phase, groups of volunteers will be in charge of creating and designing
activities of the events. Each group of volunteers will establish the set of playful
activities to be carried out based on the guide provided by the researchers, so
that the activities in all schools will have the same objective. This phase will
last for two weeks. The Volunteer Activity Guide establish for each event:
1. The first event will aim to introduce general STEM concepts to boys and
girls. Requirements given by the researchers are:
a First, volunteers show STEM concepts to children using tangible mate-
rials such as paper, cloth, drawings, among others; for example, creating
a storybook to communicate the concepts in a fun way.
b Second, in another activity children are the main actors. They must
express what they learned from the previous activity. The use of drawings
is recommended.
c Third, renowned people in STEM area and their contribution are pre-
sented by volunteers. The idea is to show experiments that women and
men in the STEM area have performed. Children will carry out one of
these experiments, which must be attractive to children.
2. The second event is only to girls who participated in the first event. It will
be focused on encouraging girls to know STEM area and provides a more
confident environment, encouraging girls to explore STEM concepts while
they can strengthen their skills in a fun way. The requirements guide says:
a Girls play a game outside their classroom, where they must use skills
related to STEM area. Some games’ examples are: treasure hunting or
passing levels of obstacles.
b Girls give their appreciations about the abilities that they used during
the game, e.g. create a wall of thoughts with girls’ words.
After that, volunteers will explain the designed activities to the researchers,
so that researchers will approve them.
Execution volunteers will visit the school, introduce themselves, carry out the
events with children. During events, a volunteer is taking note of what he/she
observes, while other two volunteers are in charge of carrying out the activities.
In addition, in the first event, a survey is applied to find out what children in
STEM area know, and after each event, interviews are conducted with children.
Reflection volunteers will meet with researchers after each event and analyze
and discuss the information collected. It is a time of reflection that each re-
searcher makes about the work done, being evidenced the results.
4.4 Phase 3: Data collection
In the case of study, both qualitative data (e.g. interviews, observation) and
quantitative data (e.g. surveys) are collected. Likewise, different sources of in-
formation are used to avoid the effects of a single interpretation. The data is
collected through:
1. Interviews: interviews are semi-structured and will be carried out after ex-
ecuting each event. Interviews will be applied to children to know their per-
ception about the activities and their opinion about what they have learned.
Interviews will be recorded and the number of participants required is a min-
imum of 30 participants, since it is the recommended number in descriptive
qualitative research [24].
2. Observation: volunteers will take notes during activities. It focuses on chil-
dren’s behavior, verbal and physical expressions. In addition, they are pend-
ing to describe how each activity was carried out, and to report particular
situations.
3. Survey: a simple questionnaire of 10 to 15 questions will be applied to
obtain information about the characteristics of children, as well as ideas and
thoughts about STEM area. This instrument will have multiple answers and
will be done before starting the first event.
4.5 Phase 4: Data analysis
To analyze the data from the interviews and observation, the Thematic Anal-
ysis method [7] will be used. The Thematic Analysis’ process consist of: (1)
Transcribing the interviews and organize the observation notes. (2) Creating the
initial themes that emerge from data. (3) The list of topics is taken and classi-
fied. In this process, a description of the themes is used to select similar themes
and place them in a new sub-list. Data is re-read several times, and themes are
identified by means of a process of repetitive interpretation, synthesizing, and
theorizing. To ensure the methodological accuracy of the results, we use a trian-
gulation strategy [25], which involve the participation of two or more researchers
to have different points of view when analyzing the data (inter-subjective). (4)
Finally, the themes are revisited and adjusted, and a consensus is reached on the
generated categories. Additionally, the quantitative data will be analyzed with
descriptive statistics.
4.6 Phase 5: Reporting
The last phase will consist of creating a document that contains the main findings
and conclusions of the research with notes or quotes from participants. This
document will be distributed in school centers, institutions and people interested
in the outcomes of our research.
5 Lessons Learned
In this section we present the lessons learned (LS) from the design of our Playful
STEM-promotion initiative. An online spreadsheet was created to collect the LS
provided by the researchers; included three columns: a) What was the identified
situation; b) What is the lesson learned; and c) How this knowledge can be used
in future research. We describe the lessons learned into three main categories,
and we provided some tips about how we can use the obtained knowledge to
improve future research (takeaways).
5.1 How to conduct a research project
We discovered that there is a lack of experience to conduct research projects in
some of our researchers.
Researcher’s background covers different research skills and areas, which
helped to take advantage of the skills in which each one was stronger to cre-
ate this initiative (e.g. design and conduct a research, formulation of activities).
Additionally, we identified that interdisciplinary research requires a high level of
organization, collaboration and commitment.
Takeaways:
– Encourage researchers to participate in events e.g. academic webinars, re-
search courses or research groups.
– Take advantage of each researcher profile
– Read related literature about how to conduct research
5.2 Research team interaction
Our second lesson learned is related with the interaction among the professors
who have participated in this initiative. First, the collaboration between the
team members provides a much stronger generation of ideas that comes from
the different fields of study. Also, there is a better support for conceptualiz-
ing and conducting research when people with research background participate.
Second, is very important consider differences in work schedules of each team
member, and the support they have to develop research projects, and in partic-
ular, related to STEM programs.
Takeaways:
– Further encourage interdisciplinary work
– Obtain support from university authorities to promote STEM research.
– Self and group motivation for continuous learning
– Encourage activities to strengthen interaction between the team (e.g. [27]).
5.3 Research context
As expected, we found relevant aspects regarding the participating institutions
and the field in which the project is developed.
In the one hand, we identified different processes across the universities that
are part of this initiative. For instance, the processes involved to assist students
(Office of Student Affairs), or the different academic calendars or schedules (six-
month or four-month period). Also, something we realized when starting this
initiative, is that we need to have a broader knowledge about primary education
systems and their regulations (e.g. process to obtain approval to conduct research
in primary schools and cognitive development process of children).
Similarly, it is important to define the ethical protocol corresponding to the
consent of the principals, teachers, children and parents to participate in our ini-
tiative. In addition, the authorization to collect and analyze data when photos
or videos are included (if apply).
Takeaways:
– Strengthen support for STEM programs through different educational insti-
tutions
– Promote STEM programs through volunteering opportunities
– Encourage industry and government collaboration, to adapt curricula to in-
clude emerging technologies and STEM topics.
– Supporting in legal and ethical regarding the execution of research projects
when there are children involved.
6 Conclusions and future work
In this document we explained in detail the design of our initiative called Play-
ful STEM-promotion to promote STEM area in primary school and focused on
the gender variable, so that other institutions can use this initiative to pro-
mote STEM in a fun way, especially encouraging girls to study STEM programs
without any prejudice.
An initiative that includes researchers with diverse backgrounds and from
different universities needs robust logistics and complex coordination. Therefore,
the commitment of the members of the work team is and will be essential to
successfully complete the objectives.
Last, the identified lessons learned have allowed us to establish key improve-
ment aspects to conduct research, propose research projects that involve STEM
disciplines, and that these projects involve initiatives for early learning levels
such as primary education
The next step will be to carry out our initiative in Costa Rica the next year,
and thus execute the design proposed in this paper.
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