Effects of a collaborative STEM-based orientation approach on senior high-school students' creativity and operacy

In 21st century, innovation capabilities become essential for the engineering students. To achieve that, creativity and operacy are strongly required and to be promoted throughout the study program. During the school orientation, it is a perfect time frame to not only make them familiar with the new learning context but also provide them a series of programs that help promote their creativity and operacy with new friends. Based on this perspective, this study proposes a novel school orientation approach which integrates the benefits of STEM and collaborative learning through a series of training and group learning processes. Meanwhile, mobile devices and applications are used to facilitate this collaboration. To investigate the effects of this approach on creativity and operacy, the experiment has been conducted during the orientation days with all newcomers. The results finally reveal that the proposed orientation approach could promote students' creativity and operacy in different aspects.