Steam engine video project wins the Europeana #STEM Challenge!

The latest Europeana STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) Challenge invited educational vloggers, teachers and educational startups to submit video project ideas that show how you can bring cultural heritage to life in classrooms and beyond.

Faced with a range of strong video proposals with enthusiastic individuals/teams behind them, we decided to award with 8,000 EUR the best idea that uses cultural heritage data and demonstrates excellent potential for engaging secondary education students with STEM subjects.

Meet our winner

Teddy Tablante is an American Mechanical and Electrical Engineer with nine years of experience in the semiconductor industry. To inspire students to pursue STEM careers, he decided to create the Branch Education YouTube Channel.

Launched in May 2018, the channel is dedicated to teaching engineering, science and technology topics, making them accessible and understandable at a high school level (ages 14-18). Currently, Branch Education has more than 50,000 followers.

'I left my engineering job about a year ago to start Branch Education and to build engaging and immersive videos with the hopes of inspiring secondary school students to pursue STEM careers. Winning this challenge helps to validate and support Branch Education's style of immersive 'how it works' based content. Winning this also brings Branch Educations goal of building a full curriculum of 'How Technology Works' for secondary school one giant step further. My hope is that one day, in addition to dissecting a frog in school, students will also be dissecting smartphones.'

- Teddy Tablante, winner of Europeana STEM Challenge 2019

The winning project

Branch Education will create two episodes using Europeana Collections resources named ‘Igniting an Industrial Revolution through Steam and Physics.’ Without the invention and evolution of the steam engine in the 1800s, the world we know today would be unrecognisable, as almost all of our modern-day technology has roots that trace back to the steam engine.

The first episode will explore technology’s roots to the Newcomen steam engine, and then go into the detailed physics behind how this steam engine worked. Additionally, viewers will be guided through an experiment that demonstrates the vacuum-based principles behind the Newcomen steam engine.

The second episode will further extend the viewers' understanding of steam engines by exploring in detail traction engines, locomotive engines and Rankine cycles. This episode will connect to secondary school classroom lessons regarding pressure, volume and temperature, and it will show how the principles that drive the steam engine also enable many current day conveniences such as refrigerators and automobiles.

The videos will be available at the beginning of October.

How did we decide?

The online competition closed on 15 May with 24 applications from 17 countries from across the world. The Europeana reuse team evaluated each of them against the assessment criteria and shortlisted eight video project proposals. From there, an external jury panel of educational experts conducted personal interviews with the candidates to discuss their video proposals and engagement and relevance for students and teachers in greater detail, as well as cost estimates and their delivery timeframe.

Stay tuned

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