Science United Festival

Displaced students around the world are experiencing interrupted education, exclusion from formal education in host countries, and fewer opportunities for science classes. This can lead them to lack incentive for learning science. Our solution is a virtual global science festival for NGOs and community teachers working with displaced students to celebrate the scientific learning happening in these communities.  

264 million children worldwide do not have the opportunity to attend formal school (UNESCO, 2017).  Of those children who are refugees as many as 88% are not attending formal schools.  Instead, many receive their education from local community centers and informal education programs located within refugee camps (UNHCR, 2016). Why teach science? Science education supports socio-scientific decision making and problem-solving, and it is important to support genuine scientific literacy for global citizenship. Science is an important subject for children to learn. Science education supports socio-scientific decision making and scientific problem-solving. Developing these two abilities, impacts true scientific literacy. Which is defined as an understanding of science by citizens globally so that they can participate in decision making on societal issues using scientific understanding. Therefore, to promote scientific literacy and equity for all children globally, we must work toward developing opportunities, resources, and materials to support and share the learning and teaching of science in non-formal learning spaces.

The Science United Festival will be held in the Spring of 2022 and will include NGO and community-based organizations that work with children globally who have experienced disruptions to their education. The process will include an initial application completed by the teacher/volunteer educator that outlines the activity/ experiment the children will be completing. Once approved, the classes will complete and record the experiment and communicate their results. Then, the students and teachers will upload their science fair video to the online platform using YouTube.

The categories will be evaluated using a rubric by scientists and graduate students who live in or come from the same region of the world as the students presenting. Students and groups will also view and respond to other presentations by commenting and sharing new scientific ideas that they have learned. 

In addition to providing students and teachers the opportunity to showcase their knowledge, the Science United Festival will also engage established refugee scientists in the global community with a venture to provide critical feedback and mentorship to future scientists, innovators, and entrepreneurs.

The populations that we serve include children who have had disruptions to their education. This is inclusive of children who may be migrants, homeless, or refugees. The categories will be by age group/grade (ages 5-8, ages 9-12, and ages 13-18). 

Having already worked with 27 large and small NGOs and community centers, distributing 17,500 science kits, and serving 2500 refugees around Greece we have seen firsthand the power that engaging in hands-on science has on displaced students' confidence and enjoyment of learning.   Through our wonderful partnerships with the Greek ministry of education and NGOs, we received feedback that our science kits and activities have supported Social Emotional Learning, new language acquisition, collaborative learning, understandings of mathematics, and opportunities to learn through play. We are hoping that the Science United Festival will allow for more engagement in science from communities around the world and continue to support children's conceptual understanding and confidence to learn science.

In order to incentivize participants, teachers will receive a certificate that demonstrates their successful participation and will support them in their professional careers. All students will receive a certificate as well that demonstrates their participation. Distinguished participants from each age group and region will be featured on our website. We would also like to provide our kits to these classrooms as well if it is feasible.   

In addition to providing students and teachers the opportunity to showcase their knowledge, the Science United Festival will also engage established refugee scientists in the global community with a venture to provide critical feedback and mentorship to future scientists, innovators, and entrepreneurs. 

Science United Festival will enable children globally to engage in collaborative hands-on experiments by having them work with other students in their class to complete an activity, record and share what they learned with a larger global community, and view and provide feedback to contributions and learning from other experiments. 

Science United Project (SUP) is a not-for-profit program that has an established product, our science kits, that is used by NGOs around Greece and has been accredited by the Greek Ministry of Education. For the last four years (since 2017), we have piloted, assessed, and distributed hands-on science activities for displaced children around Greece.We have already worked with 27 large and small NGOs and community centers, distributing 17,500 science kits, and serving 2500 refugees. The Science United Festival is a new initiative of SUP that we believe will provide opportunities to develop communities of practice and a love for learning and sharing of scientific knowledge globally.  

There are already science competitions that oftentimes are only accessible by those who have the funds and opportunity to participate. As someone who has worked both in Harlem, NY and in Greece, I have seen how science has not been an accessible subject for all children to engage in. This can oftentimes be the result of reduced funding availability for resources, the lack of professional development to support teachers learning and teaching of science, and barriers such as time and location. 

Within the informal context, many children who come from low-income communities often do not have the same opportunities as middle and high-income children to get monthly subscription kits or engage in private science and robotics classes. This can lead to a lack of opportunity for those children who are still identifying their scientific identity which is often formed during those critical elementary and middle school years. 

We are hoping that through the festival, we can grow our network of educators working with displaced students and provide them with future teacher training and materials (kits) to support further scientific exploration in their communities. 

We have currently served 2500 displaced children in Greece using our science kits. For the first year of the festival, we anticipate 30 teachers with 20-30 students each participating. We believe that the numbers will continue to grow in subsequent years.

Science United Festival will support goal four of UNSDG which is to "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all." We have already and will continue to collect data in the form of questionnaires from teachers about the activities and planning, the teachers backgrounds and dispositions towards science, the students backgrounds and dispositions towards science, and the importance of science to their context. Using this data we can see students' and teachers' backgrounds, beliefs, and dispositions before and after engaging in the festival.

Full-time: 1 person

Part-time: 3 people

Erika Gillette is the founder of the Science United Project. She has a Masters degree from Columbia University in teaching students who have disabilities.  Prior to starting the science United Project, she is the founder and a board member of HYPOTHEkids, a not-for-profit in New York City that provides access to science for underserved populations. She is also a teacher educator and professional development expert consulting with Science programs around the United States. In May of 2020, she completed her  EdD in Science Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.  

Desiree Halpern is the Global Strategist who identifies potential NGOs and supports evaluation. She met Erika at a class in 2017 about education in emergencies. Soon after, she joined Erika in Greece. Using her fluency in Farsi, she was able to evaluate student understanding of the science concepts being taught. She holds a Masters degree from Teachers College, Columbia University in Comparative and International Education and has also contributed to the development of materials and translation. 

Katerina Tsikalaki, is a Masters student at the University in Athens and studies biology education. She and Erika met while she taught the first two kits at one of the sites in Greece. Katerina has been working in science communication and non-typical science education since 2007. 

Brian Gillette has a PhD is Biomedical Engineering. He has been working since 2017 designing, testing, redesigning, and evaluating the kit. He has used his design skills to create innovative and accessible kit materials. 

As stated in MIT Solve's commitment, we as an organization is an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, ancestry, or national or ethnic origin. 

Aside from the funding, we would be grateful for the opportunity to benefit from guidance and mentorship from peers and mentors to help grow the organization as a whole. We would also appreciate the opportunity to have more coverage since we have done so much but only few people know and I think this would really help. Lastly, the use of services would be helpful since we need help with website development and also legal counseling and documents created.

We do not have a person on the team that has a financial background so it has been difficult to develop a business model to identify how to get funds outside of grants and fellowships. Although we have a large network, we would like to continue to grow to other groups that work with displaced children globally. 

UNICEF: We have an informal arrangement with them right now to support our work and help identify partners and provide training to their partner organizations in Greece. We would like to expand to a formal partnership or endorsement.

Save the Children: We would love the opportunity to work with Save the Children in order to have the children and organizations they work with participate as well.

As a dual American and Swiss-citizen-led not-for-profit, we were very excited to see the commitment made by Andan Foundation to provide a prize to support refugee inclusion. Our project aims to support refugees in two ways. The first way is that we provide refugees the opportunities to engage in educational opportunities that promote curiosity and innovation through engagement in hands-on science. We also aim to support refugee and displaced scientists with opportunities to engage with and mentor student participants in the festival.  With this award, we would like to provide funding to these mentors to participate in the evaluation and mentorship of student festival participants.

The GM Prize supports the mission of the Science United Project and the Science United festival to work towards providing opportunities for making STEM education more accessible and equitable. We would use this prize to expand our distribution of hands-on science activities to other communities around the world and also support the festival which will provide students and teachers with a platform to share their scientific learnings with other communities around the world. 

The festival will be inclusive of all genders. As an organization, Science United Project looks to provide opportunities for women and girls globally who have experienced disrupted education in order to increase the number of women and girls in STEM. We would also like to support female mentors and scientists with funded opportunities to mentor the students participating in the project so that participants who are girls can see female representation in science.