Djuro Pilar Primary School is a school situated in the city of Slavonski Brod, in the east of Croatia in the Slavonia region with a population of more than 59 000 people (2011). It provides education for more than 500 pupils, age 7 – 15. There are 71 employees in our school and 52 teachers of various profiles. Our curriculum is based on the National curricula, so our school covers a variety of subjects. Primary programmes (7 – 11) cover Science, Croatian, Math, PE, etc., and upper classes (11 – 15) offer ICT, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, etc. Our school also provides extra-curricular activities, such as Young chemists, BIO crew, Sports, GLOBE and Astronomy.

Our school has a strong will and motivation to engage in the project and innovative learning approaches with the goal of upgrading our educational process. Moreover, Slavonski Brod area is known for the air pollution and through this project we would like to encourage our students to “think green” and enable them to become responsible decision makers when it comes to the environment and ecology. In the past 3 years, EU projects, mainly Erasmus +, KA2 projects have been a core source of innovation in our classes because of the curricula “freedom” they offer. The school year 2017/2018 is the beginning of our 2-year strategic goal to boost the success of teaching in the STEM area as it was set to be by our school team for quality. Therefore, this project would offer our school and Project team members a great chance to implement new ideas and approaches to serve our specific goal.

Our school motto is “A school where good ideas come true!” and the project team considers the ideas of the project to be more than good. Considering all of this, the school is highly motivated and willing to participate in this project. Key people in charge of running the project in the school are: the head teacher, one ICT teacher, one primary education teacher, one History / Geography teacher, one English teacher and one Chemistry / Science teacher in order to provide our professional support for the project topic. Team members have been educated to work with pupils on the STEM area. Team members are teacher mentors (Science) and a teacher adviser (Geography).

Specific expertise that we can offer is based on our experience in a project called “Zajedno za školski park” (Together for the school park), a project to boost STEM area results with a tree park with a spiral aromatic plant garden with QR codes to lead to web pages on them, made by pupils. We are also involved in “SMART schools” in IPA Interreg project designed to ensure responsible behaviour towards resources (energy) and in “The Water Agent” international project (Cro/Slo/Srb) designed to monitor and evaluate water consumption in our school.