The Heriot Watt outreach team have been using resources from the Data Education in Schools programme as part of their STEM Ambassadors programme for undergraduates with really positive results.
Heriot Watt students can sign up to be STEM Ambassadors and are supported by the outreach team to develop the skills, confidence and knowledge to teach STEM activities with local primary schools. The programme organisers have found that our resources have been invaluable for building both classroom confidence and teaching approaches in students who are new to both.
“We found all the teaching materials to be of high-quality design, to have clearly defined tasks and, with the data escape room activities, to have a really useful scripted storytelling approach. All these factors really helped our student ambassadors to approach the task of running a workshop with greater confidence; to both speak in public and to communicate with younger audiences.”
In 2025, the student ambassadors ran workshops with nine P5-P7 primary classes (approx. 270 learners) in Juniper Green and West Lothian. They used the data physicalisation activities, the ‘Locked in the DATA base’ activities as well as the extension logic puzzles and ‘Make your own escape room’ activities.
The outreach team also adapted some of the resources in order to give greater emphasis to learners’ personal skills – asking pupils to identify their own perceived strengths and weaknesses. This approach was well-received by the classroom teachers as a way to recognise that, across the class, everyone’s skills are wide-ranging and varied and that a task which one pupil might find challenging, another might be more confident with and vice versa.