Projects & Research

Video has become a key tool for scientific communication. It increases the outreach and impact of projects, furthers scientific research within and across fields of study, and offers an accessible medium to engage the public in the understanding of science. The STEM for All Video Showcase is a free, online, interactive film festival that features videos from hundreds of projects aimed at improving STEM education. While the Video hall is accessible year-round, the annual Showcase festivals are used to drive visitors to the site. Viewers from around the world watch, share and interact with projects that are transforming science, technology, math, engineering, and computer science learning.

The Video hall platform supports open access and is designed to foster communication in ways that scale beyond traditional formats such as academic conferences. People can talk directly to those behind today’s latest research and innovations. It is a powerful vehicle for projects to broadly disseminate their innovative work, receive new ideas and feedback, and hear from audiences interested in using their resources. It also enables presenters to learn of related projects and to make new contacts and collaborations for future work. In 3-minute video narratives, federally funded projects share ideas, resources, data, evidence of impact, strategies, and challenges.

Each annual Showcase event presents videos created by 150-230 projects. Some video presentations are awarded recognition on the site at the end of the event as “Public Choice,” “Presenters’ Choice,” or “Facilitators’ Choice.” This participant voting system serves to increase engagement and enhances outreach of the event through social media. After the one-week Showcase event concludes, all of the videos along with the related discourse remain available to the public online, who continue to access the Showcase throughout the year.

A research component examines the extent of participation on various constituencies, the benefit of participation to projects, and the success of the events in terms of dissemination nationally and internationally.

The 2018 Video Showcase has had over 70,000 unique visitors from 180 countries.

“Very quickly, I think in the space of three or four days, we got thousands of views and as an academic, it was the first time that I produced anything in my career that got such a wide readership so quickly. One real-world consequence as part of the video was to be able to enlist support that we didn’t even know existed. Some people actually wrote to me wanting to help. And eventually, they did come to help.” Michel DeGraff, MIT-Haiti Initiative