STEAM Foundation

We are applying for the Elevate Prize because we believe that this prize will help us achieve transformational and catalytic change in science and technology education in South Africa. We would like be able to scale up our programme to reach more scholars and teachers and provide quality teacher professional development opportunities in mathematics and science education in under-resourced and rural schools in South Africa. 

We would use the funding to expand the STEAM Foundation programme, to fund more teachers and experiments, to increase the blended learning and the production of the videos, hands on practical demonstrations, and more OER resources. We would also use the funding to improve learning outcomes and build future focussed pedagogy such as 4IR and to support the SDGs.

The STEAM Foundation, founded in 2017 from seed funding from the Siemens Foundation, is a registered non-profit company which aims at improving the quality of science education by supporting hands-on science teaching and learning through the professional development of educators in under-resourced South African schools.

Our goal would be to have a lasting impact on science education in South Africa in terms of sustainability, creativity and innovation through professional teacher development. It is about developing an inquiry-based and co-operative learning approach methodology in addition to learning the soft 4IR skills = collaboration, cooperative learning and as well as the science process skills - content and mastery of science process skills. We want to continue to expand and develop innovative aligned teaching materials that are licensed as Open Educational Resources under Creative Commons. Creating educational material that is open, accessible and functional is a key goal of our organisation.

We developing educators’ resilience, empowering them to handle big classes and create positive learning environments. We understand that skilled, confident, and knowledgeable educators are key to success. Therefore, we train and empower educators to deliver better science learning through practical experiments in the classroom using hands-on and minds-on co-operative learning methods.

Competitively South Africa ranked the lowest countries in science and technology according to the Pisa Study 2016. The STEAM Foundation aims at increasing the scientific learning and education through initiating practical solutions-based projects that foster innovation, sharing and co-operation, leading to a permanent improvement in the lives and prospects of the poor, vulnerable and disadvantaged.

We are addressing the problem through teacher professional development which includes the provision of scientific equipment to enable hands on practical demonstrations. These demonstrations and workshops are  supported by videos and online learning as well as the provision of educational worksheets complete with answers that are South African curriculum aligned, written for those whom English is a second language. The worksheets are low cost to reproduce. They can be transmitted by data and are licenced under creative comment licences as open education resources (OERs). The videos and worksheets embed the practices of cooperative learning to enable collaboration and foster students learning through implementing the scientific methodology required. 

Through hands-on training and empowering teachers, we aim at developing a solid educational base enabling teachers to deliver better science learning through practical experiments in the classroom using hands-on and minds-on co-operative learning methods.

What differentiates our approach is that we use human centred design thinking to solve science and technology educational problems in a low resources and poverty stricken environment. This enables us to provide solutions work despite a lack of electricity, high data costs or minimum bandwidth. The solutions are localised to the very real practical problems that are faced by people who would like to work in this environment. Furthermore, working with an esteemed educational service provider as a partner means we can offer a complete solution while focusing on critical components around developing high-quality educational materials

We are able to take a phased approach to the materials and focus on the absolutely critical concepts required (quality not quantity). We can draw extensively on subject experts' experience, embed what they do naturally into the materials, incorporate co-operative learning into worksheets. Additionally, we have developed our own box of scientific educational equipment, using a local manufacturer for sustainability, and generated our own high-quality black-and-white (for affordability of printing) scientifically accurate drawings. This ensures affordability, accessibility, and scalability where possible. 

We are currently piloting a more extensive online version of our worksheets in addition to videos of experiments and online and blended learning. 

We know that globally we are faced with enormous challenges. These challenges include climate change issues, literary and numeracy. We believe that in order to leverage and enable the scientific community to face these challenges and develop sustainable solutions, a scientific basis in education from an early age is required. If there are no opportunities to create the impetus and love for science early on, children will not develop an interest later on, creating a substantive lack of scientists and technologists. This negative feedback cycle creates a system that cannot heal itself. 

Using collaborative learning, and hands-on experimentation, we mentor and empower teachers to be successful, confident and knowledgeable teachers.

These impacts are long term. The feedback that we are getting is that children are interested in science. Teacher's confidence in science has increased. This leads to better teaching of science and technology and these subjects are no longer seen as subjects that teachers are afraid of, but actively embrace.