Student Researchers Festival

The Student Researchers Festival is an annual festival taking place in April and is celebrating research and student researchers.
The Student Researchers Festival includes the final judging round of the National Contest for Student Researchers with poster presentations, the Award Ceremony of the Contest, Elementary School Research Projects. In addition, the festival includes several workshops, science theaters, seminars and other related activities. The event hosts more than 4000 students all over Estonia.

With the festival, we also run a social media campaign called “Dare to be curious!” (in Estonian “Julge olla uudishimulik!”). During the campaign, we put young researchers in the spotlight.

The Student Festival is for:
• Students at upper secondary level and vocational schools, teachers who are involved in research projects at school, class teachers
• Students and supervisors from extracurricular STEM clubs
• Families, friends and acquaintances of students
• Researchers and staff from universities and other organisations and companies
• Everybody who is interested in STEM-related activities

Student Researchers Festival 2022

The Student Researcher Festival took place over two years at 12th and 13th of April. Regarding this, the festival took place with limited participant at the Estonian National Museum in Tartu. In the light of restrictions, the number of participants of the festival was more than 2000. Within the two day festival, there were:

  • 83 of the best nationa student research projects with poster presentations
  • 11 inspiring speakers in the field of science and technology
  • 37 workshops held by science popularizers all over Estonia
  • A science fair featuring science organisation introducing their activiities

A big part of the festival was an annual social media campaign “Dare to Be Curios!”. The campaign was based on Instagram with the aim of stimulating an interest in science in students. Participants had to find and do a post explaining a fun science facts, with a reference to a scientific source. Top10 science facts were selected and put to popular vote in miks.ee Instagram page. The best works were awarded with prizes from our collaboration partners. Altogether, the social media campaign reached more than 800 000 people.

The main focus of the festival is on the student research projects. The Estonian Research Council has been coordinating the national Student Research Competition more than 20 years. In addition, doing a research project is mandatory in high school – therefore the number of submitted works and the overall level of the projects is high. Witht the competition, the winners of 12 national awards are selected, special awards from cooperation partners. In addition the Estonian representatives to the national competitions, such as Regeron ISEF, International Wildlife Research Week, European Union Contest for Young Scientists and International Swiss Talent Forum, are selected.

Photo Galleries of the Festival:

See the video summary of the Student Researchers Festival 2022:

Why participate?
• Students who are working on or planning a research project, either in primary or secondary school, will get a good overview of the research subjects, contents, methods used, and the possibilities of drawing conclusions and presenting results
• Teachers who supervise research projects get an overview of the methodology used in the submitted contest papers, the choice and level of the projects
• When studying the projects of elementary school students it becomes clear that research activities are possible, even from the very first years at school
• For younger students, the intense and interesting festival programme offers contacts with various fields of STEM and enriches their learning with the extra-curricular environment
• It is possible to get acquainted with different activities of science communicators, which target young people to raise their interest to STEM

 

For additional information please contact:

Annely Allik
Head of the Department of Science Communication
annely.allik@etag.ee