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Conflicting results unveiled on Australia’s STEM trend

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National finalists in this year's Young ICT Explorers competition.

With an increasing number of jobs requiring solid skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), the need is stronger than ever for education, industry and government to align to enable students to develop the fundamentals that will ensure Australia’s future economic prosperity. But the jury is still out on whether it will occur in time.

While SAP was announcing the winners in its seventh annual and most popular Young ICT Explorers competition, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) was announcing the 2015 Trends in International Mathematics and Science study (TIMSS 2015), in which Australia’s Year 4 mathematics students dropped to 28th place from 18th place in 2011.

SAP’s Young ICT Explorers competition, which encourages creativity and innovation through technology projects, clearly demonstrated the increasing focus on and commitment to improving ICT skills among Australia’s youth, with more than 1500 students from Years 3 to 12 at 168 schools presenting 652 projects across eight events – a significant increase from 874 students and 371 projects in 2015.

SAP hosted the national finals event in Sydney, where 81 student finalists from 36 schools across Australia demonstrated their creative projects including a robot that picks up garbage; a wi-fi gateway that enables parental control of children’s devices; a collection of GPS devices; a rescue maze simulating a factory collapse in which a robot must autonomously locate “human victims”; and a robotic device designed to test and aid in the purification of water.

Meanwhile, the IEA was announcing the TIMSS 2015 in which Australia’s Year 4 math students dropped to 28th place and Australia’s Year 8 math students dropped to 17th place from 11th place in 2011. More than 600,000 students in 49 countries participated in the IEA study to analyse the status of secondary school students in STEM programs.

Competition on the STEM world stage is stiff. Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Korea, Chinese Taipei, and Japan continue to outperform all participating countries in mathematics at the fourth and eighth grades, maintaining the lead they’ve sustained for two decades. In Year 8, Singapore’s score of 621 was significantly higher than the scores of all other countries, followed by Korea at 606 and Chinese Taipei at 599. The high international benchmark was set at 550.

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