Your guide to navigating the SteamCity experimentation service

Manon Ballester
Aug 8
4 min read

Transforming the city into a learning laboratory

Would you like to integrate urban issues into your courses but don't know where to start? The SteamCity experimentation service provides you with three years of European collaborative research, organized into eight sections that adapt to your teaching context. Here's how to navigate this platform according to your specific needs.

Start with the pedagogical roadmap to situate your approach

If you're discovering STEAM education or seeking to understand the overall logic, first go to the pedagogical roadmap. You'll discover how our five themes articulate around the learning city: citizenship and data governance, environment and urban well-being, sustainable mobility and transport, energy efficiency, and artificial intelligence applied to the city.

Each theme offers concrete research questions that you can directly transpose into your courses. For example, "How can we collectively design a sustainable city?" opens up interdisciplinary projects mobilizing civic education, science, and technology. This section helps you understand how to transform contemporary urban challenges into coherent learning supports, creating natural bridges between your disciplines and your students' concerns.

Master the SteamCity methodology to structure your sessions

Once you've chosen your theme, explore the SteamCity methodology. This section guides you in applying a five-step scientific approach reproducible across all your subjects: questioning to formulate hypotheses, investigating through experimentation, opening to the scientific community, synthesizing results, and implementing through communication.

You'll find template sheets to organize your sessions to help your students conduct real scientific experimentation. These tools will allow you to gradually move from frontal knowledge transmission to a collaborative investigation approach where your students construct their knowledge.

Explore resources according to your preferred entry point

The resources section offers you four access paths to the 25 available experimental protocols, according to your profile and constraints.

The disciplinary approach suits you if you teach a specific subject and seek directly usable activities. You'll find protocols classified by physical-chemical sciences, biology-life sciences, technology and engineering, visual arts and design, history-geography, or civic education. Each protocol clearly indicates the disciplinary skills worked on and links to official curricula.

The thematic approach will interest you if you work in a multidisciplinary team or wish to develop cross-curricular projects. The five urban themes group complementary protocols allowing you to approach the same issue from different disciplinary angles.

The study questions approach addresses those who prefer starting from a concrete problem. The fourteen proposed questions, such as "What is the impact of urban pollution on quality of life?" or "How does AI learn compared to a human?", offer direct entries to related protocols.

The pedagogical modalities approach will guide you according to the teaching methods you master or wish to discover: traditional experimentation, use of connected sensors, scientific inquiry, simulation and role-playing, algorithmic problem-solving, or field actions.

Integrate inclusivity from the design of your activities

Systematically consult the STEAM and inclusivity section to adapt your protocols to your classes' diversity. This section applies universal design for learning principles to each proposed activity.

You'll discover concrete strategies to diversify means of representation (visual, auditory, kinesthetic supports), action and expression (varied delivery methods, adapted digital tools), and engagement (connections with personal interests, choices in pathways). These recommendations will help you deconstruct stereotypes that distance some students from science and cultivate in all the sense of legitimate belonging to the scientific world.

Materialize concepts through urban modeling

If your students need to manipulate to understand, explore the city modeling section which offers four complementary approaches. SteamCity Brick by Brick guides you in constructing realistic territories with bricks, allowing students to concretely visualize development issues. Roobopoli presents creating miniature cities on mats to circulate programmable autonomous agents.

Sensitive mapping introduces an emotional dimension in territory apprehension, particularly suited to visual arts or geography teachers. The best practices guide accompanies you in integrating modeling whatever your chosen protocol.

Discover the smart city through experimentation

The connected learning section progressively introduces you to contemporary urban technologies. If you're new to programming, start with connected sensor experimentation activities offering eleven practical manipulations with cards like Micro:bit or Arduino to measure temperature, humidity, air quality, or sound level.

Teachers more comfortable with digital can explore the ten proposed artificial intelligence applications, from image recognition to urban data analysis. Robotic tool programming, centered on the Roobokart developed specifically for the project, offers a playful approach to autonomous navigation algorithms.

Join the community to enrich your practices

The collaboration and community section connects you to a network of European teachers sharing the same approaches. Three tools facilitate these exchanges according to your needs.

SteamCity.io centralizes data collected by European classes using sensors, transforming your classroom into a contributor to a continental scientific database.

If you wish to collaborate yourself, Vittamap allows you to publish your own experiments and discover those realized by your colleagues, creating a living library of contextual adaptations. uMap offers a space for creating collaborative maps to document and share your territorial investigations.

Draw inspiration from application examples to anticipate implementation

Before launching, browse the application examples documenting the experiences of 76 European teachers who tested these protocols with their 462 students. You'll find detailed testimonials on necessary adaptations according to levels, encountered material constraints and their solutions, as well as observed impacts on student engagement and learning.

These field returns will allow you to anticipate difficulties and appropriate adjustments that have proven successful in other contexts. They concretely illustrate how to transform your institution's organizational constraints into pedagogical opportunities.

Build your personalized pathway

This modular architecture allows you to compose your approach according to your expertise level, temporal and material constraints, and your classes' specificities. Start with a section corresponding to your comfort zone, then gradually expand to other entries to enrich your practices. Each section functions autonomously while creating links to others, allowing you to gradually deepen the SteamCity approach according to your rhythm and pedagogical objectives.

To access SteamCity resources and join the community: https://www.steamcity.eu/

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.