YES! MINT 2023 closing event
IPN researchers were on hand to guide the school teams, including the winning and second-placed ones.
The closing event of the 2023 YES! MINT competition for schools and their students took place on December 15 at the ZBW (Leibniz Information Centre for Economics) in Kiel. YES stands for Young Economc Solutions, and MINT is the German equivalent of the acronym STEM. The competition brings students in grades 7 to 9 together in school-based teams to analyze problems and create visions around issues where the business world and the STEM subjects intersect. Scientific institutes from all over Schleswig-Holstein provide the topics for the teams to work on and support them as they do so. Two teams mentored by IPN employees were part of the contest, and were delighted to take first and second place.
During the first half of the school year, the seventh- to ninth-grade participants worked on their visions for solutions to current challenges, exploring their topics scientifically with the support of researchers from various institutions. At the closing event, they outlined their ideas to the other school teams and the scientists present. Audience voting decided the winners, with young people’s votes counting for 60% and researchers’ votes for 40%.
First place went to a team from the Dahlmannschule in Bad Segeberg, Schülerforschungszentrum Segeberg, whose vision’s title cited a humorous German song, “Ich und mein Holz”. Their topic, mentored by Dr. Sandra Hansen from the Department of Chemistry Education at the IPN, revolved around “green batteries made from sustainable and biodegradable raw materials". Another team from the Dahlmannschule finished second; their vision, "Can we allow particulate matter to steal our longevity?", zoomed in on a topic titled "Are we spoiling the air we breathe?" The IPN’s Dr. Mareike Wendorff, a colleague of Dr. Hansen’s in the Department of Chemistry Education, and Dr. Florian Uellendahl-Werth from UKSH Kiel provided mentoring and support to the team.
About YES! MINT
YES! MINT is a competition which encourages school students to engage with challenges in areas of intersection between business and the STEM subjects. It ran as a pilot project from 2021 to 2023, with funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, as part of the Science@Seas initiative in the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein. The competition is open to teams of at least five young people from all types of secondary school, supported by a teacher who can be from any subject area. Working alongside academics from research institutes throughout Schleswig-Holstein, seventh- to ninth-graders analyze problems and draw up visions for solutions to regional and global challenges set out on the basis of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
About Science@Seas
Science@Seas, a regional association of research institutions and businesses by the IPN, aims to bring together existing STEM programs and support structures in Schleswig-Holstein under a shared umbrella and expand their activities. This collaborative endeavor, pooling the efforts of the Technische Akademie Nord e.V. (TAN), the ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, the European University of Flensburg (EUF), the Schleswig-Holstein Research Forum, and businesses active in the region, aims to raise the public profile of the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and the associated opportunities, with a particular emphasis on engaging young people.
