Involving local administrations in STEM promotion: how to extend STEM initiatives to a whole region.
This paper describes a novel initiative whose main goal is not only to encourage young students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); Although this is typically seen as the core of any STEM project, we aim at involving local administrations in the project, thus allowing to more easily disseminate and promote STEM areas among students' families and teachers. The central idea of our approach relies on involving local administrations, and making them allies for the project: they will not only help to disseminate information about the project in their local areas; they will also attract teachers to promote the activities within schools, and more importantly, when convinced of the need of the project, will provide fundings to hire specialized teachers in charge of developing a series of after school learning activities along the academic year. This way, every local administration becomes partner of the project, allowing to hire specific professionals from STEM areas instead of making the project to rely on volunteers. The methodology developed has allowed to reach 20 small towns in Extremadura, their local governments, teachers and families, with more than 400 students, some of them attending sessions for several years.