Impacts of a Supplementary STEM Education Program on School Children from Vulnerable Communities

In Cartagena, Colombia, there are significant issues of social inequality and low educational quality. As a strategy to improve STEM skills in boys and girls, a supplementary STEM education program was developed for children between the ages of 7 and 12 attending two schools in vulnerable neighborhoods. The contents of the program included the sustainable development goals, analysis of the community challenges, programming skills, and female role models in STEM. The traditional psychological test of Raven’s Progressive Matrices was applied to a sample of students, along with a simple questionnaire that requested socio-demographic information and other vital data for the project, such as the availability of computers in their homes. The results of the tests showed improvements in the children’s intelligence, which suggest that the intervention may have contributed to reducing performance gaps and strengthening the children’s abilities.