Improving STEM skills with digital cultural heritage
Across Europe, concern is growing over the decline in students’ foundational STEM skills—particularly in mathematics and science. As digital transformation accelerates and labour markets shift, the demand for technically skilled and adaptable individuals is only increasing.
A Widening Gap in STEM Skills Across Europe
According to the European Commission’s Education and Training Monitor 2024 and recent PISA results, basic proficiency in mathematics and science is declining across the EU. Even more concerning is the rise in severe underachievement—students failing in these subjects simultaneously.
Why STEM Education Matters
STEM education builds foundational and transversal skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving. These are key in fast-growing sectors like clean energy, AI, ICT, and advanced manufacturing.
The EU’s STEM Education Strategic Plan, under the umbrella of the Union of Skills, aims to reverse this trend with three core objectives:
- Lead: Anchor stem as a strategic pillar in the EU’s education and skills policy (European Commission, 2025,p.7)
- Level up: Build a stronger and more inclusive EU stem talent pipeline (European Commission, 2025,p.8)
- Lift barriers: Advance women in stem and inspire future innovators (European Commission, 2025,p.11)
At the same time, digital cultural heritage can be a resource for transformative, interdisciplinary learning. By integrating Europe’s rich cultural archives into the classroom, educators can bring STEM subjects to life in ways that are engaging, relevant, and inclusive.
Digital Cultural Heritage: A Powerful Educational Ally
Europeana platform offers access to millions of digitised cultural artifacts from Europe’s museums, libraries, and archives. Using these resources, educators can make abstract STEM concepts more tangible and culturally relevant.
Teaching with Europeana blog features dozens of learning scenarios that blend STEM with art, history, and culture—helping students connect STEM topics to real-world and historical contexts.
Someone can easily search for STEM learning scenarios integrated with the topic of Arts just by using the relevant filter: STEAM (STEM + Arts) Archives – Teaching With Europeana. Learning scenarios like Symmetry in Mathematics , Adaptation to Climate Change with Technology, Let’s Build Bridges! , and Exploring natural science and natural history museums are ready to be used in other context to address STEM related topics.
Celebrating STEM with the use of digital cultural heritage resources: Highlights from the 2025 STEM Discovery Campaign
Getting closer to the end of this year’s activities, the ‘Deployment of a common European data space for cultural heritage’ project has some already some outstanding results to share.
Over 290 entries were submitted to the 2025 STEM Discovery Campaign as part of the Scientix Cultural Legacy Award. Of these, 152 entries passed the initial review, constituting newly developed Europeana stories of reuse. These stories showcase the wide-ranging ways in which digital cultural heritage resources from Europeana can be meaningfully applied across different areas, topics, and subjects. While most submissions are in English, this year’s collection also includes stories in Greek, Spanish, Italian—and for the first time, Bulgarian—demonstrating increasing linguistic diversity. Training courses led by Europeana Master Trainers—most of whom are also Scientix Ambassadors—have successfully concluded, with over 1,000 educators trained. This group includes both long-time supporters and newcomers.
The high level of participation, the quality of the contributions, and the wide reach of the training courses and the Campaign reflect a significant achievement in the collaborative efforts between European Schoolnet and Europeana Foundation with the strong support of Scientix, the Europeana Master Trainers, and the wider educational community.
By combining STEM with digital cultural heritage, educators can create richer, more meaningful learning experiences that foster both curiosity and competence.
PDM 1.0: the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana and has been provided by theDeutsche Fotothek.