“Education reveals the prospect of the future happiness of the human race.” – I. Kant

Our mission is to influence the global industry and the local community through innovation and excellence. In this respect, we constantly exercise our passion for the global engineering arena. We also joined the Brașov Community Foundation to support projects with a major educational impact for young children and teenagers from the local community. The education promoted by the foundation is focused on STEAM – science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics-principles.

“Științescu” Program is a satellite of the Community Foundation and, since 2015, is the symbol of a pro-science movement that encourages original projects and offers children and young people the wonders of STEAM. This year, 30 new projects were submitted in a contest for funding and 13 out of them were selected based on the following objective evaluation criteria:

1. Relevance: The project contributes to attracting students to STEAM fields and leads to the development of skills such as critical thinking, problem solving and teamwork.
2. Interdisciplinarity: The project accesses information from several disciplines/sciences and integrates them into coherent and relevant interactive activities for the age group of the proposed beneficiaries.
3. Coherence: The project has a well-defined need, a goal, objectives and activities, correlated with an appropriate solution and the necessary resources included in the budget.
4. Efficiency: Financial and human resources are allocated rationally, the budget is realistic, detailed, and achieves the proposed results.
5. Sustainability: The results are aimed at a medium and long-term impact.
6. Innovation: The project brings to the forefront new, innovative ideas, alternative methodologies, novel themes, or addresses new categories of beneficiaries among those targeted by the program.

The projects selected are centred on ample learning and knowledge needs:

A. Science Center Projects:

1. ProtoShop Live (Laborazon Association)
2.  Experimentarium (Initiative Group coordinated by Ciprian Branea)
3. The Science and Art Lab (ArtByte Initiative Group)

B. Biology, geography, nature

1. STEAM Farming (Initiative Group coordinated by Daniel Petrule)
2. Nature, learning space STEAM (National Research Organization of Romania)
3. Smiles under the microscope (Carpaterra Association)
4. Seeds of Science (Schubz Sustainable Development Center in Rașnov)

C .Programming and robotics

1. Learnex 2019 Summer School (Center Region Support Association)
2. AR-T (Academy of Computer Science – Brașov Partner Fund)
3. RoboIT 9 (Didactic Team Gymnasium School No 9 “Nicolae Orghidan” Brașov)

D. Theoretical and practical initiatives

1. Initiation in CNC (Tudoran Initiative Group)
2. EduAS (ClubMate Șaguna)
3. Mobile School Laboratory (Initiative Group coordinated by Mihaela Bucșa)

“Knowing,” “Investigating” and “Interpreting” are the three basic “scientific competences” that, according to the PISA evaluation (Program for International Student Assessment), a child should acquire before high school to be competitive on the labour market.  Our hope is that this initiative will continue to grow at least as it did so far to support the scientific literacy of young people in Romania.