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A Study on Pupils’ Motivation to Pursue a STEM Career

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The Impact of the 4th Industrial Revolution on Engineering Education (ICL 2019)

Abstract

The industry is facing with the increasing lack of STEM graduates every year. It is of vital importance to motivate pupils for technical schools or schools in the STEM fields. This paper analyzes data from 693 pupils about their interest in a STEM career as well as their attitude towards STEM in general. Within this study, we also analyze the influence of the participation in robotics workshops. The method is a quantitative survey with questionnaires. Results show what mostly influenced the pupils to pursue a STEM career as well as the influence of robotics on them. Finally, the paper presents three STEM-related projects, which we also analyzed in regard to their impact on the pupils.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://sci4all.eu/.

  2. 2.

    https://www.sparklingscience.at/en/projects/show.html?--typo3_neos_nodetypes-page[id]=1263.

  3. 3.

    https://pria.at/education/makersschool/.

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Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge the financial support by the “Sparkling Science” program, an initiative of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, under grant agreement no. SPA 06/294, as well as from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology in the frame of the “Talente regional” program under grant agreement no. FFG 860104.

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Correspondence to Munir Merdan .

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Jäggle, G., Merdan, M., Koppensteiner, G., Lepuschitz, W., Posekany, A., Vincze, M. (2020). A Study on Pupils’ Motivation to Pursue a STEM Career. In: Auer, M., Hortsch, H., Sethakul, P. (eds) The Impact of the 4th Industrial Revolution on Engineering Education. ICL 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1134. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40274-7_66

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