Personal reflection about stem workshops organised by elhuyar

1. Personal reflection
about stem workshops
organised by Elhuyar in
covid-19 times

2. What is Bizilabe
 Research centres for 10-14 aged students. Out of school.
 Active in four locations of the Basque Country

3. What happened this year?
 We had to adapt urgently our face-to-face workshops to
online format because of the pandemic.
 The first result was an increase in the abandonment of the
workshop.
 Despite the fact that most young people like technology and
were optimistic the first days, perhaps because of the
novelty, taking regular classes over the internet during
confinement was already hard enough for them to continue
to take extracurricular classes online in the afternoon.

4. First lesson learnt
 There are few young people willing to participate in online courses, they
prefer to be with their peers in face-to-face activities. What we learn
from this experience is that social relationships are much less
satisfactory than we thought when they are done online.

5. The questions we ask ourselves are:
 How can we enrich social relations online?
 What technologies help us do this?
 How to give voice to them?
 How raise interaction among students?
 What is the appropriate duration for the courses?
 How to design the course so that there are informal spaces
online, in the same way as happens during the breaks?

6. Answers
 We still do not have answers, but we are
experimenting to discover the best way.
 Perhaps, a purely online workshop is not enough
and we should try to have combined formats.

7. How are we doing right now?
 We use jitsi for the videoconferences, we share the screen to show
them a powerpoint, to explain what they have to do, and we also
give them documentation in pdf. Jitsi has some drawbacks for group
dynamics: no breakout rooms, poor image quality if there are many
participants, anyone can eject, give permission to enter or silence
etc.
 Some of the doubts we have are: aren't we sacrificing the health of
the little ones by encouraging a sedentary lifestyle in front of the
computer? We can work on stereotypes and the gender perspective
in our syllabus, but to what extent does the distance between the
trainer and the students complicate the contact and accompaniment
of boys and girls? What can we do to make courses more inclusive
of the most disadvantaged? For example, young people living in
homes without a computer for each of them.

8. To sum up…
We have several dilemmas and few
strong answers. Our idea is to finish
this school year and take into account
the voice of the students, i.e. their
feedback, in order to carry out
implementations for the next school
year.

9. Thank you!