Young Explorers' Club
- Poland,Villages, towns and cities in Poland
- 2002
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The Young Explorers' Club (YEC) programme usually takes form of extracurricular activities for children and adolescents from 3 to 20 years of age, run by educators, who are volunteering their time and work. Educators are mainly teachers, but they can also be employees of libraries, cultural centres, science centres and museums. Their role is to support club members in discovering the world by actively learning laws of physics, exploring the secrets of biology or conducting research projects.
The mission of the Young Explorer Club Programme is to develop various skills in club members through personal and collective experiencing of science. Our goals are:
• To increase learning abilities of the club members, such as self-motivation, building new knowledge on the knowledge already possessed.
• To increase STEAM skills in club members, i.e. reaching answers using skills related to the fields of science, technology, engineering, art and applied mathematics.
• To increase club members’ social skills, such as teamwork, sharing knowledge, skills and experience.
• To build a sustainable community of club members – children, juveniles, supervisors and partners.
• To create opportunities for club members to meet personally with scientists and science promoters.
YEC is 18 years old in 2020. It is the Copernicus Science Centre and Polish-American Freedom Foundation’s programme. If someone would like to join us, please contact our office in Warsaw.
YEC programme usually takes form of extracurricular activities for children and adolescents from 3 to 20 years of age, run by educators, who are volunteering their time and work. Educators are mainly teachers, but they can also be employees of libraries, cultural centres, science centres and museums. Their role is to support club members in discovering the world, which is why they are called mentors. Children and teenagers work in groups. They conduct experiments, learn through experience working like scientists using the scientific method. Depending on their age and interests, club members are actively learning laws of physics, exploring the secrets of biology or conducting research projects.
YEC Programme is co-funded by two institutions: The Polish-American Freedom Foundation and Copernicus Science Centre. The Copernicus Science Centre, the coordinator of the programme, enhances the development of the YEC with the support of the Strategic Partner, the Polish-American Freedom Foundation.
Our experience shows that YECs help make up the deficits faced by students and teachers in disfavoured communities with limited access to good quality education and science. Participants develop social skills such as collaboration, communication, and soft skills, become more independent, self-confident, and courageous, and have more ambitious education plans. Teachers who work as YEC mentors improve their personal and professional skills. The kind of active educational methods used by YECs can then be employed in school classes. Methodology consultants who are YEC mentors use their YEC experience when working with other teachers. Active YEC mentors often become leaders of local communities and launch further educational activities in their regions. YEC partner institutions use their experience from the programme in their work.
YECs focus on autonomy; participation is voluntary. Participants and their mentors decide together what they want to do and how. In open learning situations designed by the mentors, participants enjoy freedom, and what they do is not subject to traditional assessment. Engagement through discussion, questions, experiments, and efforts to identify and solve problems all matter more than knowledge of facts or definitions. YECs are founded on the principle of collaboration, with participants learning to share tasks and the responsibility for performing them. Conducting observations and experiments together creates a unique environment for peer learning. Participants jointly choose methods and procedures. This unique atmosphere favours mutual learning, with young people feeling more independent and having a greater sense of agency.
YEC are inspiring PBL, IBL – the scientific method in general. Also, a constructivism in education, but in sense of guided discovery, not a pure one.
The most innovative aspect of our program is to encourage participants to discover by themselves instead giving available definitions.
One of the most important principles of the program is that participants work by themselves. They independently carry out experiments and implement projects. So, they are using their hand skills as well as learning and developing hand skills.
Peer learning and peer mentoring is very important in YEC programme as mentioned above.
YECs are addressed to children and adolescents aged 3 to 20. They operate in preschools as a curricular
/extracurricular activity, in primary and secondary schools as an after-school activity, and also outside of formal education institutions, for example at libraries, cultural centres, and natural-science education centres.
YECs are inclusive – participation in the programme is free of charge, and the cost of the activities is low. The programme operates in diverse social environments. There are many clubs in small underfunded schools in the provinces that rarely have the support of parents or the local authorities. Our experience shows that YECs help make up the deficits faced by students and teachers in disfavoured communities with limited access to good quality education and science.
YEC participants act as researchers. They are based on what they observe and not what they can read in the book. They learn that scientists should only take real data into account and not manipulate it.
In YEC we explore the nature in general. Mainly through STEM but often we combine it with art, history and geography. Combining elements of physics, mathematics, biology and chemistry is very common.
YECs are founded on the principle of collaboration, with participants learning to share tasks and the responsibility for performing them. Conducting observations and experiments together creates a unique environment for peer learning. Participants jointly choose methods and procedures.
Some clubs implement their own research projects related to the local community – air pollution, history, specific geographical location, cultural aspects, for example in mining region.
The whole programme is based on democratic rules. YECs focus on autonomy; participation is voluntary. Participants and their mentors decide together what they want to do and how.
The Copernicus Science Centre strives to maintain the consistency and quality of the programme’s growing network, in collaboration with partners and mentors. We offer access to resources and help train cadres, sharing our knowledge and experience. The community is sustainable thanks to the intense networking. In order to maintain it, we meet on a regular basis – participants gather at cyclical club meetings, clubs at regional science picnics or science festivals, mentors get together at conferences and programmatic meetings, partners meet during the annual YEC Forum, study visits, etc.
Opting away from central management, we instead invited public institutions and education-sector NGOs to form a network of partnership-based collaboration. Currently, there are 12 autonomous partner institutions that coordinate the activity of YECs locally in Poland. Regional partners include Higher Education Institutions, in-service training centres for teachers, local governments, and science centres. The nationwide partners are organizations that support the development of education and programmatic activities in their substantive aspects. The programme began in Poland, but YECs have grown to become a burgeoning international movement. In Georgia, we have partnered with the Ilia State University in Tbilisi, in Ukraine, we are developing YECs in a special consortium with the Lviv Dovzhenko Centre, Insha Osvita, the Impact Hub Odessa, and the Science Centre Ternopil. In Armenia, the partner institution will be the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory, supported by the Jinishian Memorial Foundation. We also have launched YECs in Ethiopia, where we have signed a Memorandum of Understanding Partner institutions that support mentors from their regions through regular meetings, workshops and organizing science festival and educational conferences for them.
Opting away from central management, therefore we instead invited public institutions and education-sector NGOs to form a network of partnership-based collaboration. Currently, there are 12 autonomous partner institutions that coordinate the activity of YECs locally. Regional partners include higher-education establishments, in-service training centres for teachers, local governments, and science centres. The nationwide partners are organizations that support the development of education and programmatic activities in their substantive aspects.