On Wednesday, February 15, the well-attended kick-off event marked the official start of the research and development project "transMINT4.0", which will be funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with around 800,000 euros over a period of three years until 2025.
Around seventy participants accepted the invitation to the kick-off event organized by project leader Prof. Dr. Eva Blumberg (Didactics of Science Education) and Prof. Dr. Katrin Temmen (Didactics of Technology). The project team welcomed its regional cooperation partners, supporters and stakeholders, including representatives from schools, the lower and upper school supervisory authorities and numerous non-school educational institutions such as the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum (HNF), the German Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) and the zdi centers (Future through Innovation). They are all looking forward to the project, which aims to optimize the transition in science and technology learning from the primary to the secondary level on the basis of research by incorporating extracurricular learning venues and digital media. Norika Creuzmann, representative of the Green Party in the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament, who was present at the event, was particularly interested in the treatment of sustainable topics.
University President Prof. Dr. Birgitt Riegraf welcomed those interested in the project on behalf of the Executive Board. In her address, she emphasized the special importance of the cross-faculty cooperation project in its regional anchoring. Blumberg and Temmen presented their motivation for the project, its basic idea and goals, and the research design. The role of the numerous regional stakeholders and cooperation partners was not to be neglected, so that they also had their say with their own statements. Various points of contact with the project were thus made clear, for example from the perspective of the Paderborn waterworks, WestfalenWIND, the zdi centers, KiBi or the education authority, and not least from the school practice of teachers and students.
The research team expects the first interim results in the fall of this year.
