Globe Feron Education

LIFE Campus was created to give young Danish students intensive engagement with a range of learning experiences in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Certainly, local field work and laboratory experiments are fundamental to scientific exploration, but LIFE Campus also has world-leading resources for giving students memorable learning adventures in 360-degree immersive environments created by cutting-edge digital technologies. The facility’s extensive AV systems and sophisticated control networks, designed and installed by the consulting and integration firm Stouenborg, include a total of more than sixty Meyer Sound self-powered loudspeakers.

Located in Lyngby, adjacent to the Technical University of Denmark, LIFE Campus is operated by the non-profit LIFE Foundation and was founded with the mission of inspiring Danish school children to become fully engaged in their formative years with inquiry-based science education. The new 5,400-square-meter facility, opened in late 2021 by HRH Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, is situated in an expansive natural

STEM in the classroom. Photo: Shutterstock

STEM education programs for school-age students have become “little more than amusement” after being diluted to fit into “siloed” academic curricula, a new analysis has warned, while noting students actively pursue STEM-related careers if engaged effectively.

Fully 77 per cent of the 1 million students participating in its targeted educational programs subsequently changed their career motivation to a STEM-related field, Re-Engineering Australia (REA) notes in a new report that found “most STEM programs today comply with few of the guiding principles of STEM and have become little more than amusement value for students.”

Such programs are “heavily focused on entertainment to showcase STEM rather than promoting understanding and achieving academic goals,” REA found, blaming the issue on educators “reverse engineering STEM into an existing siloed education curriculum.”

REA – which runs school-years programs such as F1 in Schools, SUBS in Schools, Space

SUMMERVILLE — On a sun-soaked day in April, the students in Robin Heard’s special education class at Sand Hill Elementary School were outside taking care of their garden.

Their classroom overlooks the “Sandpiper Seedlings” beds where the students — mostly fourth and fifth graders — gestured to the different vegetables, listing their favorites. Popular choices included tomatoes, potatoes and carrots.

“I like carrots, and horses love carrots,” said fifth grader Claire Lawrence, who Heard said is a budding equestrian.

Fourth grader Jayden Phillips pointed at small red pepper flakes he and his classmates had placed throughout the beds. 

“It keeps the animals away,” he said.

Inside the classroom, lettuce, basil and peas grow in a vertical hydroponic garden specially designed to cultivate plants indoors.

A leading report into gender parity in education has found a complete lack of data on science education from low-income countries, exacerbating a situation where pockets of “extreme exclusion” still exist.

The UNESCO report, “Deepening the debate on those still left behind,” analyzed primary and secondary education data from 120 countries, but only 28 of the 82 low- and low-middle-income countries were represented, and there was no assessment data for science in any low-income country.

Limited data collecting capacity and a lack of systematic national assessments for students prevent researchers from having a complete picture of how learning outcomes are developing in the global South, said Manos Antoninis, director of the UNESCO