Design and Deployment of K-12 STEM Program in Tunisia’ Public Primary Schools

This SSIT Guest Lecture was presented by Dr. Nizar Rokbani, Tunisia Section SIGHT at a Chapter Meeting organised by IEEE UK and Ireland SSIT Chapter and SSIT IST-Africa SIGHT on 09 November 2022.

Focus

“Robotics for Equality and Democracy” is a STEM and educational robotics program deployed in Tunisia public schools as a partnership between IEEE Tunisia Chapter SIGHT and the academic inspection for primary education of Dar Chaabane II, Nabeul, Tunisia Republic. This lecture described the program implementation’s main steps covering alignment with local educational system policies and regulations, the educator’s training, the organization of the learner’s activities and their assessments based on a project based methodology. The IEEE STEM portal and the Try-Engineering lesson plans were the main resources used to build the teaching/training materials. Trained educators deployed educational robotics activities with their pupils, and then engaged them in a project building dynamic leading to a competition and demonstrations in a public event called “Nawadina”, our clubs. The program was developed as extracurricular clubs. Pre-interviews and a post-interview were arranged to measure how children perceived the robotics activities and eventually how those activities influenced their perception of STEM and engineering.