The Scientix® Cultural Legacy Award results: outstanding educational activities featuring Europeana!

The results are in: the Scientix® STEM Discovery Campaign (SDC) 2026 was our best edition yet! Thank you to every educator, school, library, project and STEM enthusiast who took the time to design, document and share an activity. Your enthusiasm helped make this the most successful SDC in Scientix history, and we couldn’t be prouder to have had the Europeana educators’ community among the contributors.

This year’s Campaign broke every previous record:

• Over 9,000 entries submitted
• More than 1,000,000 participants in total (yes, 1 million!)
• 200,000+ teachers and 800,000+ students involved
• Entries received from over 50 countries across Europe and beyond

What a collective achievement!

The Scientix Cultural Legacy Award supported by Europeana

This year’s Scientix Cultural Legacy Award, supported by Europeana, invited educators to share a “Story of Reuse” on how digital cultural heritage items from Europeana.eu or existing resources from Teaching with Europeana were used into classroom activities. The goal of the award was to celebrate educators who creatively connect cultural heritage with scientific inquiry, showing the power of STEAM educational approaches.

Winners of the Scientix Cultural Legacy Award 2026

• Aikaterini Spitsa (Greece), for the entry “From Seeds to Systems: Reimagining Sustainable Cities through Cultural Heritage and Storytelling”.
• Iro Koliakou (Greece), for the entry “Racing against the odds”.
• José María Díaz Fuentes and David Rodríguez Martínez (Spain), for the entry “Project Gemina 3D. Virtual Archaeology”.
• Luigia Palumbo (Italy), for the adaptation and implementation of the existing entry “Brain Challenges”.
• Silvana Jakimovska Binova (North Macedonia), for the entry “From Ancient Automata to Student Creations: A Europeana Robots Journey”.

Runners-up:

• Irina Nanu and Rita Tasa (Spain), for the entry “Europeana as a Classroom Lab: Investigating the Gladiator ‘Ash Drink’”.
• Özlem Kaya (Türkiye), for the entry “From Electrum To Digital”.
• Margarita Dakoronia and Chrysoula Georgakopoulou (Greece), for the entry “Emotions Behind Shadows and Lights”.
• Daniela Brogna (Italy), for the entry “Sky patterns on ceramics: Road from İznik to Salerno”.
• Nevin Bilgiçli (Türkiye), for the entry “Mathematical analysis of the acoustic properties of historical buildings”.

All the Stories of Reuse mentioned are already available on Teaching with Europeana – Stories of Implementation, check them out now!

Congratulations to all winners and runners-up, and special thanks to the more than 100 educators who submitted Stories of Reuse featuring Europeana. Your work is helping build a richer, more connected community of educators bridging cultural heritage and STEM.

We can’t wait to see what you bring to the next edition of the Scientix STEM Discovery Campaign!

Public Domain: the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana and has been provided by the National Archives of the Netherlands.