IRIM’s reach – more than 200,000 pupils and 3,000 teachers in Croatia!

December 30, 2019

This year we celebrated our 5th birthday and the 4th anniversary of starting our first project, the Croatian Makers Robotics League.

If someone had told us when we were starting that we would create the biggest extracurricular ecosystem of STEM projects in Europe, we wouldn’t have believed it – but project by project, year after year, we reached more than 200,000 pupils and more than 3,000 teachers just in Croatia and made a positive mindset change.

Our 2018 yearly overview can be found here, and 2017 here (all links are on Croatian, we suggest using auto-translate) To keep this brief we will emphasize only the key topics and projects from 2019:

We organized the League Superfinal – a competition for the best teams in the 2018/2019 school year and more than 75 teams from all over Croatia participated. Read more here.

Our team has developed Neuron – a simple and centralized web app for managing the League that lowers the amount of administrative work teachers do to be involved in the League. We also donated the system to our partners in Kosovo.

The League has been financially supported by the foundation “Hrvatska za djecu”, the Ministry of science and education and Google.

WARC is a festival in youth robotics that brings together more than 400 pupils and their mentors from more than 20 countries. WARC gives the participants a chance to show their talents, programming and robotics skills in a few different categories.

IRIM, as the organizer of the MakeX competition, had been given the opportunity to invite two teams from Croatia to the competition – the team from elementary schools “Josip Antun Čolnić” from Đakovo finished in 17th place and the team from the Association of technical culture from Osijek was the best international team and finished in the 8th place in the overall rankings. The same team won a special ‘Best modification award’, awarded to the team with the best engineering modifications on the robot. Read more here and here.

The project was financed through European union ESF funding. Even though the project formally ended, the collaboration between IRIM and the faculties continues, and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb also joined.

The pilot started in March 2019, with the participation of 57 schools from Virovitičko-podravska, Osječko-baranjska and Vukovarsko-srijemska county. IRIM donated micro:bit educational microcomputers for the pupils in the schools involved, educated the teachers and developed educational materials on how to use the micro:bit within the existing school curriculum. More than 150 teachers and 250 pupils were involved in the pilot.

This project makes Croatia the first country in the world to integrate digital literacy teaching through the use of physical computing from the beginning of elementary school education. Read more here and here.

Building on our successful projects in libraries we have found partners in Switzerland to introduce the projects we have been running in the Croatian libraries as a pilot in 5 libraries in Switzerland. Furthermore, we will jointly develop equipment and educational materials to introduce Citizen Science to libraries in both countries.

Educational citizen science sets will be donated to the libraries – one kit per library will be installed to continuously measure ecological variables, and two more kits will be available for borrowing and joining the citizen science project. Through this project we want to empower children and adults to become active citizens through gaining knowledge in the STEM field and strengthening their digital competencies thus enabling them to become knowledge creators and sustainable development facilitators in their communities. Read more here.

This project is financed by the Switzerland confederations through a Swiss-Croatian cooperation program.

In 2020, the schools will start working on their own projects with mentorship from the companies that will become part of the network. Read more here and here.

Continuing our cooperation with the Rotary E-club Croatia and Rotary Club Zagreb Center, with the donation of Erste bank we continued our projects with the SOS Children’s village Lekenik and donated equipment (3D printers, robots, micro:bits, laptops etc.) that children together with their mentors will use to participate in our projects and activities.

Our educators, and other maker enthusiasts held a number of workshops for the children in the village. Read more here and here.

Just like last year IRIM was the main sponsor of the event ‘Večer matematike/Math Evening’ – an event in elementary and high schools that aims to popularize mathematics. About 800 schools and other educational institutions participated in this year’s event, and part of the tasks used the micro:bit as an interactive tool to popularize math – because ‘M in STEM stands for Mathematics’.

IRIM is a strategic partner in a project that brings digital literacy and programming into rural Sri Lanka. Through the project equipment was donated, and teachers and volunteers were educated to hold educational activities with the micro:bit in 100 schools. Read more here.

The ProMikro project that IRIM initiated in partnership with the Ministry of Science and Education  has entered its 3rd year of implementation and laid the foundation to introduce informatics as a compulsory subject in Croatian schools. In 2019 additional schools entered the project, 1000 micro:bits were sent to the schools for new children joining the project, and 200 new teachers were educated, which shows a constant interest in the project.

IRIM participated in the open days of the Institute Ruđer Bošković for the 3rd year in a row. The open days of the Institute popularize science and had more than 35.000 participants to date. The visitors had a chance to program micro:bits, drive different robots and get different 3D printed objects as gifts. Read more here.

IRIM was a partner in the “Hrvatska glagoljica” exhibition on the Croatian glagolitic script held in the National and University Library in Zagreb. The exhibition merged modern educational technology like the micro:bit and 3D printers with the old glagolitic script. The world’s biggest micro:bit was created for the exhibition – you can see a video of it here. The exhibition had more than 6,500 visitors. Read more here.

This year’s museum night had the theme: Museums – Innovation and Digital Future. IRIM participated in the event by hosting free workshops in cooperation with the Zagreb Typhlological museum (a museum that holds museum material related to people with disabilities, with a focus on visually impaired people) demonstrating how technology can help visually impaired people. We also held an interactive demonstration at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. Read more here.

We have continued to develop educational materials for all our technologies and created a large repository of materials that you can use even if you do not participate in our projects – thus we continuously contributing to the development of education in STEM and do-it-yourself fields. Visit the website here.

The backbone of our financing are the donations of the Bakić family. However, we are very proud and thankful for all  the donations that we receive. Our biggest donors, sponsors and supporters in 2019 were: Google, Croatian Telecom, Hyundai Croatia, Bruketa&Žinić&Grey agency, Undabot, Westgate, TDK Croatia and other companies that supported our work with their donations.

Our projects are co-financed by the EU ESF fund, the Swiss-Croatian Cooperation Fund  the Ministry of Science and Education, the foundation “Hrvatska za djecu”, individual counties and others.

However, we are especially thankful for the private citizen donations from Croatia and abroad that supported our work with one-time or multiple donations.

If you would like to support us, see the details here.