Curiosity in Action Toolkit

Throughout Curiosity in Action, we recognised the value of having specific tools and resources for building and maintaining meaningful partnerships, delivering activities and capturing impact. In some cases, we were able to use incredible resources already developed. In others, we noticed a lack of what we were looking for, so we spent the time developing these in the hopes of supporting others to be able to establish their own youth worker-researcher partnerships and explore STEM with young people. This toolkit is the culmination of our work across the last two years, the resources we developed and our learning along the way. We hope you’ll find this toolkit useful!

How to use this toolkit

This toolkit aims to serve as a guide to support you through partnership work, planning and delivering STEM-themed activities and capturing meaningful impact. While developed for youth workers and researchers looking to work together to co-develop and deliver STEM-themed activities, many of the resources are applicable to a wide range of projects. This includes but is not limited to those looking to get started with or strengthen partnership work, exploring and learning more about an action research model, youth group activity ideas and engaging evaluation methods.

The resources were developed with the wider sector in mind, but also to specifically cater to our Curiosity in Action project and the partners involved. Please adapt and use these resources in a way most useful to your own contexts.

The resources are listed in order, from first getting your project set up right through to ways of sharing the impact. If you are looking for a particular resource or would like to know more details on a particular stage, you can click the buttons below to go straight to that section.

Our interactive digital templates will take you to canva where you can edit and use the resources directly. If you are accessing the links using a work email, you will need to have access to a canva pro account to be able to access and edit the resources, if using a personal email address, you can access these on a free account.

We also have a free printable pdf version with all of the resources included here.

If you use the toolkit, whether many of the resources or just one of them, we would love your feedback on how it worked in your context, you can get in touch with us here.

Getting started

Planning and delivering sessions

What does a typical youth group session look like?

In truth, there is no single answer to this! Each youth group and session looks different with sessions planned around the individual young people in the group. What they do have in common is that they are youth-led with young people being in control of what they take part in. You can usually count on there being a juice and biscuit break being part of the session too! The best way to get an idea of a youth groups structure is to reach out and ask them and actively involve them in the planning.

“When you're working with young people, they tend to take things and sort of run with it in their own way. So it's almost never going to go the way you would plan.” - Connor (researcher from the project)

Capturing impact

Case studies