Agnelli Foundation and Ferrari together to promote passion for STEM

A passion for science can start as early as the first years of school. It often takes shape from a question, from a phenomenon observed in everyday life, from something that cannot be immediately understood, and stimulates curiosity, inviting one to imagine, to hypothesise, to try. It is from this idea that Scintillab was born, the new free project promoted by the Fondazione Agnelli together with Ferrari, with the scientific contribution of the CNR - Public Relations and Integrated Communication Unit and the co-designing of the OpenDot Foundation for teaching materials for schools.

Scintillab (https://scintillab.it/) is aimed at primary school teachers, pupils and students with the objective of making the first steps into science more engaging and meaningful, offering in-person training for teachers and a teaching box to transform every classroom into a laboratory of discovery. In this way, pupils become active players: they observe, formulate hypotheses, experiment and verify, progressively building a scientific way of thinking.

At the heart of the project is the inquiry-based methodology, which guides learning through questioning, exploration and problem solving. Shadows, equilibrium, gravity, probability and the basics of scientific enquiry become opportunities to question the world and seek answers through experience. Science is thus proposed not only as a body of knowledge, but as a way of thinking, combining intuition, creativity, reasoning and rigour.

To make this approach practicable in everyday school life, the in-person training day and the box become essential tools: the former is dedicated to experiencing inquiry-based learning activities first-hand; the latter, ready-to-use, provides materials and operational proposals for exploring five major scientific topics in small groups. Tools designed to break down the barrier that often separates laboratory teaching from everyday practice at school.
Students observe, make hypotheses, try, make mistakes and try again: and it is in this process that a first, authentic encounter with the scientific method takes shape. The project is the result of a structured collaboration between Fondazione Agnelli and Ferrari on the educational front, pooling expertise and vision to contribute to the development of quality public education. For Fondazione Agnelli, Scintillab represents a new element in a consolidated commitment to the promotion of STEM skills, with a line of projects that over the years has flanked educational research with concrete interventions in schools, with the aim of improving the quality of teaching and expanding opportunities for students.

Ferrari has always supported educational projects as an engine of innovation and growth for the new generations, not only in its own local area. CNR's Public Relations and Integrated Communication Unit contributed to the design and supervised the educational and methodological content. In its first edition (school year 2025/2026), Scintillab has already reached 59 comprehensive schools, 238 teachers and over 4,700 students, in the provinces of Cuneo, Savona, Modena, Parma, Ancona and Matera. This was not a random choice: in fact, it was decided to concentrate the intervention mainly in provincial contexts, outside the large capitals, to favour a wider and more capillary diffusion of educational opportunities throughout the country.