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This paper describes graphics-based teaching programs developed in genetics and points out to other educators how to create animated lessons to teach complex dynamic concepts in any area of science. Computer animations have proven to be very effective in teaching dynamic principles as well as illustrating static information.

As a reaction to the growing economical, ecological and societal demands on education innumerous efforts and programs have been initiated throughout the educational chain to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the STEM field. On that background we sketch a framework to foster creative engagement in learning to promote scientific inquiry and modeling processes. In the theoretical part the article presents a dualistic perspective on the grounding of creative cognition in concrete experience, highlighting the productive and reflexive interplay of procedural and conceptual knowing. Their entanglement is pivotal to successful knowledge construction and application in science and technology. The ‘mechanics’ of creativity is elaborated exemplarily in a project based learning sequence that starts from investigating and modeling elastic forces as a basic paradigm of creative model construction. The creative part refers to conceptual expansions of the elastic spring model that assist in modeling emergent mechanical properties in hard and soft condensed matter. With additional moderate instructional input this knowledge is productive in creating basic models of the self-organized dynamics of biomolecular systems that orchestrate life at the cellular level. The sequence demonstrates how the interplay of hands-on experience and conceptual modeling can promote near and far transfer.

This review presents a sequence of exemplary experience-based encounters with self-organizing systems on different levels of difficulty. Based on hands-on experiments and creative modeling it provides a viable educational road to build up a deeper understanding of self-organization principles and their comprehensive nature. Theories of self-organization describe how patterns, structures and new types of behavior emerge in energetically open systems, resulting from the local interaction of many components. As an external control instance is missing, the underlying philosophy is counterintuitive to our habits of causal thinking. This thematic and conceptual framework impacts on many STEM domains and presents a blueprint for modeling emergent structures and complex functions in natural and technological systems. It reveals unifying principles that can help in reducing, in structuring and, finally, in understanding and controlling the emerging complexity. An overview across diverse STEM domains highlights the role of this overarching concept. This cross-disciplinary approach can help in improving the dialogue and the knowledge exchange between the individual fields. Moreover, in a self-referential fashion, the modeling of self-organization provides us with fresh perspectives to reflect our own creative processes.

A brief review of the history of special scientific high schools in Russia intertwined with personal recollections is presented.

The nurturing of top young science talents remains vital in helping to mitigate current and future global challenges. Written in the form of a letter, this paper chronicles the major activities of the International Science Youth Forum, an annual event held in Singapore where top young science talents from across the world have the opportunity to interact with Nobel Laureates and other eminent scientists. Reflections of the student and educators who participated in this event are also documented, and it is hoped that their experiences can pave the way for other similar activities to be organized worldwide.

The Einstein-First project is designed to resolve a conflict between modern science and the science taught at school, which is a significant cause of students’ negative attitudes to STEM. Our program resolves these contradictions by teaching our best understanding of the universe, dubbed Einsteinian Physics, from an early age. We use models and group activities in a carefully crafted 8-year learning progression, to give students a basic understanding of the language and concepts describing our physical universe, from quarks to the big bang. Einstein-First works with teachers to develop courses, lesson plans and training workshops. These components all contribute to curriculum trials where student learning and attitude outcomes can be assessed. Every trial of curriculum modules or short intervention programs has yielded exciting, positive outcomes including surprising gender equalising effects and benefits for less academic and disadvantaged students. There are multiple classroom trials in place in local partner schools. In this paper we present an overview of the Einstein-First program and give examples of the ability of students from age 8 to 12 to comprehend modern scientific concepts.

The modern history of biology shows how Darwin's selectionist theory has replaced instructionist theories in explaining the operations of living things; first, in the 1850s, with inheritance through the gene pool and second, in the 1960s, with the replacement of a template theory of immune system function. Now, scholars in several disciplines consider that the brain is a Darwin machine, too. Underpinning Darwinism is a generative heuristic, in which entities (or variants) are generated, and later subjected to tests. Entities which survive the testing are regenerated, and so on. This heuristic offers considerable value for science education. In this paper, it will be argued that both the nature of science and its learning can be understood through the application of this heuristic.