Can STEM education take advantage of massively multiplayers online competitions?

Collaborative learning can provide remarkable support to the efficacy of teaching Science, Technologies, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Collaboration, indeed, is essential to reinforce the interaction among learners and to foster active learning and comprehension construction in the student. In the social setting of a collaborative learning experience the learner interacts directly with the instructor and with the other actors, and these interactions can guide interpretation and construction of concepts. To test these assumptions on the field, in 2008 we created a platform and a format for Massive Multiplayer Online Competitions (MMOCs), able to support large groups of students (25 to 250 teams with 500 to 10.000 players at a time). In the last five years the platform has been used in 2 national editions of MatematiCup and 5 editions of EcologicaCup, for the Italian secondary schools. MatematiCup and EcologicaCup have the primary objective to encourage young people´s interest in mathematics and sciences, to experience how to participate in the network, to propose new solutions to the logistical problems associated to large students´ competitions, to spread the use of new technologies and to analyze a new form of collaborative and participatory Internet. The paper describes the proposed format and the main results of this experience.