The Little Scientists Early STEM Education Awards are the only awards in Australia dedicated to STEM excellence in early childhood education. In their 5th year running, the Awards provide a rare opportunity for educators and teachers of children 0-8 years to celebrate their STEM teaching skills and passion on a national stage.

Nominations are open 1 March-31 May 2026 and educators and services are encouraged to nominate in both categories.

Category 1. Excellence in Early STEM Education Award (this page)
Early learning services & early primary classrooms can nominate by submitting an inquiry-based STEM project co-developed with children 0-8 years. Learn more.

Category 2. Outstanding Early STEM Champion Award
Individual educators and teachers can be nominated by their peers for championing STEM in their early learning setting. Learn more.

Submitting an inquiry STEM project

Use Little Scientists' project inquiry cycle & project guide and the questions in this form to start co-developing your project now. You can also undertake our 2-hour Online Workshop: "Inquiry-Based STEM Projects" that supports educators to co-develop and document a high-quality STEM project with children.

Ensure you give children time to explore their project's research question, ideas, and experiments over many weeks. You can also submit a past project so long as it was started after 1 January 2025.

How Your Project Will Be Assessed
The judges will assess your project based on how child-led the inquiry was and how central STEM learning was throughout the process. They will also evaluate how effectively your project addressed each of the six stages of the project inquiry cycle outlined below.

Stage 1. If the research question was sparked by the children.

Stage 2. How children’s ideas and hypotheses were gathered and used. (Documentation upload required.)

Stage 3. How children were supported to lead and engage in research and experimentation. (Documentation upload required.)

Stage 4. How children were supported to observe and describe what was happening.

Stage 5. How children documented their results. (Documentation upload required.)

Stage 6. How children were supported to reflect on what they had learned at the conclusion of the project. (Documentation upload required.)

Documenting Your Project

High‑quality documentation is central to your inquiry‑based STEM project. Ensure you
collect documentation incrementally as you move through each stage. Your everyday tools — Floorbooks, daily reflections, jottings, observations, annotated samples, photos, videos, learning stories, etc. — are sufficient. Learn more about high-quality project documentation.

Written responses

If English is your second language, please don’t worry about your writing style being assessed. What matters is that you:

Answer each question clearly.
Use as many direct examples and quotes from the children as possible.
Provide detailed responses to paint a rich, vivid picture of your project for the judges.

Save & Edit Later
This form allows you to save a draft and return to it later. To do that, click "Save Nomination" at the bottom of this page, then click "Skip Create an Account" at the bottom of the form, and then enter your email address to have a draft link emailed to you. This is entirely managed by JotForm (not Little Scientists) so to be safe, we'd recommend drafting and finalising your responses in a word doc before submitting via this form.

For questions or support, please contact awards@littlescientists.org.au or (02) 8080 0065.

Section 1. Your service or classroom

Full name of the person managing this nomination. *

First NameLast Name

Your title, e.g. educator, teacher, educational leader, director, etc. *

Name of your service or classroom/school. Please write this as you would want it to appear on an award.*

Your best email address to contact regarding this nomination*

Please double check this for typos.

Your best phone number*

Please include the area code if a landline.

Address of your service or classroom/school*

Street Address

Street Address Line 2

CityState / Province

Postal / Zip Code

Service or school website or social media page (if you have one)

Name of service director or lead classroom teacher (if this is not you)

First NameLast Name

Section 2. Your inquiry-based STEM project

Before proceeding, please ensure you have already developed, documented, and completed an inquiry-based STEM project with your children over several weeks or months.

Project Context

How many educators worked on the project?*

How many children worked on the project?*

What was the duration of your project? An inquiry-based STEM project should take place over many weeks or months.*

Project Stage 1. Select a research question sparked by the children.

An inquiry-based STEM project explores a single research question. What is the research question that your inquiry-based STEM project explored? (Max 10 words)*

Little Scientists will use this as the title of your project.

Which children’s questions or interests sparked your research question? Explain how the project came about. (Max 150 words)*

In order for your project to be meaningful and captivating for the children, your research question should be sparked by the children or strongly inspired by their interests.

(Optional) Upload documentation that helps to illustrate the question or interest that inspired your project. Combine multiple files into a single file & title the file "ServiceName Stage 1"