Design of STEM Activities: Experiences and Perceptions of Prospective Secondary School Teachers

Abstract

STEM education is attracting the attention of researchers in the education of sci-ence, mathematics, technology and engineering, for it encourages school practices that prepare students for real life professions. An important aspect of STEM edu-cation is the design of STEM activities, for this design influences how the activi-ties mediate students’ experiences in the STEM classroom. In the present chapter, we suggest to consider this design in two lenses: The lenses of the activity in-quiry and the lenses of the integration of STEM subjects. We further describe ac-tivities built by secondary school prospective mathematics teachers who were part of a teacher education program for preparing graduate students who finished their first degree in mathematics, engineering or computer science. The prospective teachers designed the STEM activities in the frame of a didactic course called “The didactics of teaching secondary school mathematics”. The research results indicated that the prospective teachers found it difficult to write STEM activities according to the ‘discovery inquiry version’ or the ‘open inquiry version’. More-over, they found it difficult to write activities according to the third or fourth inte-gration types.