Nowadays, knowledge, information, and communication technologies are vital to society, demanding individuals with abilities such as self-learning, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication and social skills. Traditional teaching systems are not fast enough and fully able to cover all these needs. Furthermore, although there is an increasing demand for STEM competencies (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths), there is also a decline in the number of students pursuing science and engineering vocations. To stimulate a faster evolution of education and to promote STEM vocations, an increasing interest in new teaching-learning strategies (flipped classroom, service learning, project-based learning, game-based learning, …) is emerging.

This work presents a project-based collaborative learning project at secondary schools using the combined efforts of four contributors: the local education administration, teachers at school, reference experts, and students. Collaboration between schools and expert researchers can be an essential link in reinforcing education, particularly in STEM learning at schools. Despite its potential, this collaboration has received little attention so far. This initiative, aimed at 15-16 year-old students is part of a service-learning program of the Catalan administration named “Research, creation, and services”. Its aim is to promote learning competencies by collaboratively solving challenging projects proposed by entities outside the school. In this case, the Department of Electronics and Biomedical Engineering of the Universitat de Barcelona and the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia propose a real-world connected scientific-technological challenge, based on the measurement of air quality at classroom, that students at school should solve seeking for increasing science and engineering vocation, improving general engagement, and fostering teamwork.Under this initiative, the administration is a general supervisor of the project. Its role is to organize and coordinate meetings to monitor the process. The researchers of the research centers adopt the role of reference experts for scientific and engineering issues. They supervise and validate the process at a deeper level, and they are responsible for providing tools and solving scientific and technical problems. Therefore, teachers are relieved from being reference specialists, and they become facilitators of the project. They concentrate their task on controlling the dynamics of the project, organizing groups, directly guiding the initiatives of the students, animating them to look for sources of knowledge, advising and validating their experiments, following their interactions, promoting social skills, and fostering rigorous communication. Finally, the students are the true developers of the project, and are responsible for the outcomes. This sum of efforts and partition of responsibilities has shown good performance and has provided excellent results. The analysis of the results reveals that the scientific and technical knowledge exposed to the students has been understood and acquired. Their outcomes suggest genuine enjoyment and indicate active engagement with the scientific method.

Keywords: STEM, service-learning, project-based learning, school-research collaboration, scientific learning, engineering learning.