SciChallenge

The SciChallenge contest was launched on January 1, 2017 and the submission system was open until May 15 at midnight. In order to create awareness, the consortium intensified its promotion activities by using both physical events for preparing projects together with young people as well as by using targeted Facebook Ads for the promotion.

Participants and Projects

Until the middle of May, more than 300 projects were submitted for the SciChallenge contest. While some countries were leading in the first 2 months of the contest, a greater variety of nationalities of the contributors was reached in the past weeks. Furthermore, it is interesting to see that SciChallenge managed to motivate more female than male participants. The trending topic was of course the “Open Stem Topic”, because it allowed more flexibility for the projects. However, also other topics such as “Clean Water” and “Climate Change” were chosen frequently, while some topics such as “Internet Fraud” and others didn’t get so much attention. More information can be found on the statistics page: https://www.scichallenge.eu/en/statistics

Online Community Rating Jury rating

From all the submissions, the projects with the most views and likes from each country and from each category until May 15, 24:00 CEST, will make it to the final round. These projects will be rated by the SciChallenge Jury, which is consisting of 37 experts and practitioners: https://www.scichallenge.eu/en/jury-members

In order to make the rating for the jury members as easy as possible, SYNYO is currently developing a rating system, where the jury members log in with their individual credentials and rate the projects that were assigned to them based on language and thematic field. The jury will rate the contributions of the participants along the following criteria:

(A) Presentation of a Problem: the participants present or reflect on a problem in a clear manner and in a way that corresponds with the chosen format;

(B) Creativity of the Realization: the contributions are realized in a creative way;

(C) Added Value: the contributions have an added value beyond the life-time of the contest, for example to be used as inputs or examples within other settings of (formal or informal) education and science engagement;

(D) Future Thinking: the contributions aim at addressing major challenges and propose new ideas for addressing these challenges;

(E) ONLY FOR AGE GROUP 15-20 YEARS: Scientific Approach: The reference to and adoption of existing scientific knowledge through the participants’ individual approach will be assessed.

For each criterion, the jury members allocate 1 to 10 points and the rating will select the winners of the SciChallenge contest.

The Award Event

The winners of SciChallenge will be awarded on July 21 at the Award Ceremony, which takes place at the Main Ceremony Hall at the University of Vienna. All winners will be invited for this trip and of course the consortium is also planning a visitors program for the young people and their parents. In addition to a certificate, which they will receive for their successful participation in SciChallenge, the winners will also have the chance to get one of the three audience awards, which include vouchers worth of EUR 3.000,-, EUR 2.000,- and EUR 1.000.-.