Hands-on seminar: Planning and supporting a school STEM activity day

+++ New offer in summer semester 2026 +++

Enrolment now possible in WueStudy under event number 13010165

In the summer semester 2026, we are offering the seminar "Hands-on: Planning and accompanying a school STEM activity day" in the "Social Entrepreneurship Education / Social Innovation Education" module. In this practical seminar, student teachers develop creative STEM learning stations for a day of action for the 5th grade of a Würzburg secondary school.

The seminar is aimed at student teachers from all types of schools, offers pedagogical practice and impulses for future teaching situations and can be credited with 3 ECTS in the free area through an examination.

Thinking differently about STEM learning, the seminar content

Project days are an important part of the Bavarian curriculum and a great opportunity to get pupils interested in STEM subjects. But how do you design a project day that really motivates?

In this seminar, students develop creative STEM learning stations for an activity day. The aim is to create learning environments that arouse curiosity, invite discovery and enable independent research. The focus is not only on designing exciting STEM experiments, but above all on the question of how learning processes can be accompanied in such a way that pupils actively gain experience in the STEM field and become enthusiastic about these subjects in the long term.

In small groups, students develop their own ideas for learning stations, test them step by step in the seminar and check their methodological and didactic viability. Joint reflection phases open up space to critically scrutinise their own role as prospective teachers: What does it mean to "teach" less and accompany more? What attitude is needed to productively support learning processes?

On the action day itself, the students take on the role of learning guides and gain valuable practical experience in dealing with exploratory and research-based learning. The subsequent joint evaluation offers the opportunity to pool experiences and derive key insights for their own teaching practice.

Social entrepreneurship education in the context of STEM learning

Didactically, the seminar is based on an action- and project-orientated approach that takes up central elements of social entrepreneurship education. Learning is understood as a creative space in which students develop their own ideas and try out how to take responsibility in dealing with real challenges.

In this context, social entrepreneurship education is deliberately not reduced to the development of business ideas or work in student companies. Rather, it is understood as a pedagogical approach that combines STEM learning content with creativity, cooperation and social relevance, thereby promoting key skills for the future.

In the spirit of Education through Entrepreneurship (according to Lackéus 2015), the principle of value creation for others takes centre stage for the students: they learn in an action-oriented way by creating concrete added value for pupils.

The core idea of the seminar is for students to help organise a STEM activity day for a partner school through the experiments they develop. They develop learning stations, develop questions and experimental designs for discovery and research-based learning and take responsibility for the didactic design of the learning processes.

Afterwards, the students reflect on the day of action both in terms of the impact of their programmes and their own learning processes. The seminar combines approaches of social entrepreneurship education with elements of service learning and enables experience-based learning in a real-life context.

 

Lackéus, M. (2015): Entrepreneurship in Education - What, Why, When, How, In: OECD Education Working Papers, No. 131, OECD Publishing, Paris. DOI: 10.1787/5jrs8stt4v6j-en