First Contact

Public schools make the first move by contacting Fundesteam either through their website, an email, a phone call or by attending one of the many events that Fundesteam hosts. The school is then required to provide some background information and is put inside Fundesteam’s database.

Case Assessment and Planning

With the information given by the school Fundesteam’s team analyzes the social reality that the school and the community around it faces to understand their needs. This process usually lasts around one day.

This step is one of the most complicated ones since Fundesteam is tasked with finding either public or privet institution that can cover 50% of the costs needed to help this school. Fundesteam has several alliances and deals with institutions that help yearly and is constantly looking for new benefactors. Because of the bureaucratic, legal and administrative steps required to cover these expenses this step usually takes between 2-3 months.

During this last steps actions such as presenting the project, visiting previously benefited schools to measure success and visiting the community applying take place.

After taking care of all these requirements Fundesteam then presents the contract and the calendar for the rest of the project to the school so the implementing process can begin.

Delivery of Resources Necessary for the Project

A protocolary act is held in the school with the benefactors, the local community and Fundesteam. The purpose of this event is to highlight the importance of the project that is about to be implemented and to motivate everyone from students to educators about the project.

These resources include the robotics lab and the new curriculum that must be incorporated, focused heavily on STEAM.

Impartation of Aptitude Tests to Students

An aptitude test is held to record each student’s strengths and use this information to guide them towards a concentration where their skills can be showcased and allow them to take full advantage of the new resources.

Training educators

A training program of three days is imparted for at least 25 educators, this course is meant to prepare educators to teach the new elements of the curriculum such as programing and robotics but also anything they hadn’t covered before. A test is given both before and after the course to make sure that the educators have really absorbed the knowledge and are ready to teach the content.

Follow up

Three or more educators are selected to keep attending training sessions so they can acquire more in-depth knowledge of STEAM. The purpose of this is so that they can manage their local program and don’t depend on Fundesteam whenever they find something a road block or something they haven’t seen before.

Robotics Competitions

This is the unofficial final step of the process, because of their relationship with PanamaSTEM Fundesteam is co-host of the qualifying competition for the World Robotics Olympiads (WRO) in Panama. Fundesteam uses this and other smaller robotics competitions through the years to measure the level of success of their projects in the schools. Through a school’s turnout, passion and skills Fundesteam can observe the impact that the project has had on each situation and further investigate the ones with smaller impacts.

Fundesteam also adopts each qualified team and prepares them through close mentoring to ensure a good performance in the WRO so they can make a good name for Panama and also to motivate the teams to keep on working hard on their projects and realize that their projects are actually going somewhere.