STEAM Stories: A Co-creation Approach to Building STEAM Skills through Stories of Personal Interest

The ever-increasing digitalization of our everyday lives repeatedly and prominently sparks discussion about the need for STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) skills. In terms of education, STEAM initiatives focus on skills development and the use of digital technologies to stimulate students’ engagement with societal issues. This paper introduces an iterative co-creation-based approach for enabling and enriching STEAM learning experiences. Our goal is to foster young citizen scientists by having them share and discuss stories of personal interest and experience, while practising and improving their STEAM skills through local engagement. The young citizen scientists contribute to all phases of a story, including its co-creation and conception, data collection, discussion in workshops, and generating outputs relevant to local and regional policymakers. The particular spatial focus of the approach is in the places where the stories take place. The stories are uploaded to a map-based platform, which is used for data collection and visualization, and as a focus for discussion. Through personal involvement, the young citizen scientists are motivated, which fosters local ownership, sustainable use of the platform, and effective capacity building in digital skills.