Beijing (PingWest)- STEM education has received a great deal of attention in China as a key focus in training children and students in the skill sets that is really important for the next generation of skilled workers, Chen Biao, Senior vice president at STEMedu told PingWest.

Speaking to PingWest at SYNClub EduTech conference 2019, Mr. Chen said there is a massive amount of capital flowing into innovation in STEM education in China, as part of national educational development plan, which committed it to investing CNY100 billion on STEM education by 2025. 

“When you hear the word “STEM education in China, it is not just referring to the Science, Technology, Enginnering and Match, it is more like a quasi-STEM education in a broad term which also includes the STEM subjects including arts, robotic, logical thinking, coding. In China, there are emerging trends that increasing number of schools and companies have engaged in STEM activities, many schools have been seeking to introduce STEM in teaching and learning from elementary school level so that children build a comprehensive skill set.” Chen Biao told PingWest.

According to Chen, the boom of STEM education in China driven by the encouraging policy announced by government, the first government recognition of STEM education started from February 2017 when the Ministry of Education in China announced to add STEM education into the primary school curriculum.

“Though the concept of STEM education came from the US, Chinese government has become increasingly aware of the important of STEM education, encouraging schools to add more STEM content into the daily courses instead of extracurricular activities,” Chen Biao told PingWest.

Despite the rapid growth of STEM education in China, Chen Biao said China’s STEM education also faces a major challenge with a shortage of both professional teachers and proper training for existing teachers.

“In order to effectively implement STEM education, full-time teachers specializing in STEM education are needed. However, at present, China lacks qualified STEM teachers and a training system is yet to be established. For instance, with regard to the certification of STEM teachers, a huge number of teachers involved in STEM subjects received no serious science education, many of them are part-time teachers whose main skill sets could be on math or Chinese,” Chen Biao told PingWest.

In response to challenges in the market, STEMedu has launched sets of complete education and teaching materials and service for K12 stages through successively cooperating with Beihang Unversity, Beijing Normal University, Southeast University, education publisher Pearson group, it has so far provided more than 6,000 primary and middle schools with in-class, online and extra-curricular innovative teaching and product services. STEMdu helps elementary and middle school teachers with non-science and technical backgrounds delivering coding, STEAM contents to students through its online educational platform and offline experimental science labs, using a mix of online interactive videos and ready-to-use teaching kits.

According to Chen Biao, started from 2013, STEMdu has offered more than 20,000 online situational courseware to schools, which allows educational contents to be presented in form of interactive videos.

“The core aim of STEM subjects should be making students able to think, interact with each other, not making products,” Chen Biao said.

“As a well-rounded STEM educational institution, we also have opened nearly 200 offline chain stores in China, and scientific experimental centers in Canada and summer camps in North America, bringing STEM contents to children and K-12 students through interactive and experimental educational projects. By cooperating with universities such as Toronto University, York University, Bangkok Thonburi University, we have successfully ventured into Canada, Southeast Asia, Singapore market.” Chen Biao told PingWest.

Founded in August 2013, STEMdu has secured at least CNY200 million from five rounds of funding over the past few year, the company’s major backer includes English education giant New Oriental Education, Huahe Capital. In May 2019, the edutech company has closed its series C+ round of funding from investors led by Fortuna Capital with the participation of Huahe Capital. The fresh capital will be used to support R&D on STEM subjects and scale operation in domestic and overseas market.

The latest investment will allow us to bring our STEAM and coding experience to even more schools and teachers in domestic markets, as well as overseas market,” said Chen Biao.