Capacity Building in STEMS through IoT

Digital Transformation is turning society toward a cyber centred society; this enhanced and key role of cyber technology imposes the need to foster a culture of “cyber”. The key subjects to ensure this awareness are STEM. Several governments are fostering educational initiative in STEM as a key building block for a sustainable and harmonic digital society. This paper introduces the state of the art dominated by the ongoing digital transformation and the need to radically improve capacity building specifically in the sector of cyber technologies and related sectors. This implies the boosting of STEM improving the impact of educational resources starting from lower-level schools. Project Based Learning engaging young generation in addressing concrete problems thanks to their own curiosity in developing a personal approach is one of the potential assets. A cooperation between European and African countries can offer a valuable application of these methodologies sharing the experienced PBL approaches developed in EU to African countries having most of the young population and just starting to deal with digital transformation. This approach to education offers a key opportunity to the Global South to scale up its innovation and sustainability on the global scene. Among the different educational approaches Project Based Learning is particularly effective in this sector engaging students in the solution of concrete problems approaching STEM subjects as tools to solve them. This approach favours the so called “deep learning”, something that is deep rooted in students. We can assimilate it to the perceptive-motor method that humans use to learn how to ride a bicycle, putting the “hands on” and trying by themselves. This paper describes the foreseen methodology and potential impact of IoT Project Based Learning in an EU-African cooperation framework.