One of the first and most important steps on Project Based Learning is to identify social issues to work with the team. Although it seems obvious, in practice this process requires something more profound than choosing a theme. Students can identify and propose various ideas, but for them to be applicable to a project with an STEM approach, it is essential that the solution integrates this approach clearly, as explained by educator Liz Villalba, Coordinator of Ideation of the Solve for Tomorrow program in Argentina.
According to her, it is necessary to observe the environment, listen to the community and develop a critical view of reality. So, the starting point requires positioning students. “The presentation of the problem should put the student as an active agent, with access to information and unique experiences,” he points out. Thus, by validating his place not only as a student, but as a social actor with transformative capacity, there is a change of perspective: the problem ceases to be a cause for complaint and becomes an object of intervention and work.
Secondly, explains Villalba, the teacher must mediate the identification phase through examples of closeness and triggering questions. “The goal is to encourage a critical look that helps students to objectify the situation, analyze its causes and assess the feasibility of a solution from the STEM approach,” he adds.
In the Smartbin project for example, students in Paraguay were researching their country’s energy deficit until they connected that challenge with a daily situation: the large amount of organic waste generated at school lunches. From this intersection, the question that would guide the project arose: How can we use this waste to generate energy?
The idea combined two everyday problems and had local relevance, technical feasibility, scientific application opportunity and key elements for progress. In the end, the solution resulted in a smart waste container that converts organic waste into biogas, a clean and renewable energy source. The initiative was a winner of Solve for Tomorrow 2024 in Paraguay.
From brainstorming to filtering problems in STEM projects
To identify a problem, the path in class usually starts with dynamics such as brainstorming, recalls Liz Villalba, who is also a philosopher, with more than a decade of experience in teaching, pedagogical design and accompaniment of educational and social teams. “The tools for filtering and prioritizing ideas should be geared toward fostering critical judgment and informed decision-making,” he says.
But the real challenge comes after these dynamics: how to transform those ideas into concrete, investigable, and impactful problems. Villalba recommends passing the proposals that arise through the following filters:
1. Relevance and Empathy (The “Why”)
- Urgency and Persistence: Is it a problem that requires immediate solution or is it a historical challenge that no one has yet solved?
- Impact: How many people does it affect? Does it directly affect our nearby community or especially vulnerable groups?
- Motivation: Is this the problem that most mobilizes or worries us as a team?
2. Impact and Value (The “Why”)
- Transcendence: What value, if not urgent, would solving it bring in the long run?
- Transformation: Would the solution significantly change users’ reality or is it just a temporary patch?
3. Feasibility and Feasibility (The “How”)
- Scope: Is it a problem that we can solve ourselves with the resources we have (or can get)?
- Complexity: Is it “easy” to solve in the time that lasts the school cycle or does it require an infrastructure we do not own?
4. STEM Opportunity (The “With What”)
- Technology and Science: Can it be addressed or solved using technology, mathematics, or engineering?
- Research: Does the problem allow us to research and apply curricular knowledge?
When a real problem becomes an impactful solution
In Chile, a group of students identified misinformation as a nearby problem. Fake news not only circulated on social media, but also generated conflict within the school and its families. Based on this observation, they developed the project Fake Out, an application aimed at detecting fake news, which was the winner of Solve for Tomorrow in Chile (2024).
The path to that solution began with deep research: interviews with journalists and specialists, analysis of the impact of misinformation in the region, and dialogues with the community to understand why people share content without verifying it. The problem, initially broad, was delimited from evidence and context, which allowed thinking of a viable technological solution.
Something similar happened in a project about pollinating bees in an agricultural community in Venezuela. The initial idea, working with bees, was too general. It was teacher mediation that helped to focus on the problem. “I told them that this was a very broad topic and we tried to incorporate a way in which the project could leave something to the municipality,” explained Professor Anderson Pérez. From there, the students identified a concrete challenge: the impact of agrochemicals on biodiversity and the quality of life of pollinators, key to agricultural production. They created, then, a prototype that allows them to measure the populations of bees and their relationship with the quality of the mulberry crops of Castile (rubus glaucus), fruit very specific to the region where they live.
The teaching role in balancing guidance, challenge, and autonomy
According to Liz Villalba, this process must be guided without losing the active participation of students. “It’s important to ask if the problem really affects the community, if it mobilizes the team and if it can be solved with the resources available,” he says. It also highlights the importance of a clear opportunity to apply STEM: “The problem must allow for research, experimentation, and use of technology or science.”
In all these cases, the teacher’s role was decisive. Not to impose solutions, but to guide the process, ask questions and help delimit the problem. Such accompaniment also involves maintaining the delicate balance of validating ideas while challenging them. “A high-expectation dialogue must be established. The problem must be complex enough to be attractive to overcome, but possible enough that the effort makes sense,’ he says.
Finally, the specialist highlights a central aspect: learning also involves institutionalizing error as part of the process. “[This] gives the student the confidence to try again and look at things with a fresh perspective,” he concludes.
When this stage is well worked, the projects not only gain in quality but also in direction. And students, rather than learning content, develop a fundamental ability: to look at their reality, question it, and act to transform it.
