STEM from the perspectives of engineering design and suggested tools and learning design

STEM is an educational concept about which little consensus has been reached as to what it is, and how it can be taught in schools. This study provides a snap shot of prominent contemporary research results contributing to better understanding of STEM and its implementation in education. In addition, this study tries to tackle an issue that school science has traditionally been built around well defined problems for learning purpose. As most real-world problems are ill-defined, this study proposes to implement the notion of STEM to help students acquire real-world problem-solving skills by engaging them in an engineering design process, in which students use the technology tools of graphic-based programming. The proposed learning practice is experiential task-based learning, in which students are forced to apply and acquire related science and mathematics knowledge during their engineering design process. It is hoped that related rationales and discussions will stimulates researchers and educators to adopt or tailor their own learning designs for the current generation of youngsters and promote the quality of teaching and learning in STEM.