The closing of schools due to Covid-19 has brought a dimension of uncertainty into STEM education. Despite the closing of schools due to the need to observe physical distancing, some schools have found ways to continue teaching and learning on virtual platforms enabled by increasingly pervasive fourth industrial revolution environments. In this study, the teaching of Ordinary level mathematics and science in pursuit of STEM education goals as enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT) in online classrooms was therefore, explored. Using an interpretive case study, relevant data were collected from two mathematics and three science teachers during semi-structured interviews. These participants communicated their experiences in transitioning from face-to-face to online classrooms as they worked to promote STEM education during the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings reveal teachers’ experiences of this transition and their selection of particular Web 2.0 tools to establish online classrooms. Notably, mobile instant messaging tools proved to be a popular option for being cheap, user-friendly, temporal, and multimodal. The findings also revealed that teachers struggled to adapt the hands-on activities to suit online teaching resulting in the use of teacher-centred approaches. Keywords: Covid-19, mathematics and science, online learning, STEM education, virtual platforms

This study seeks to establish the quality and type of feedback necessary and suitable for learners, understandable by learners and implementable in the learning process by the learners to improve progress in learning numeracy. However, although written feedback is believed to be instrumental in shaping the pupils’ classroom performance, there is less agreement on whether this is workable in the real world of the classroom or has remained an intended goal of feedback. There is limited work in literature on how pupils respond or use written feedback to improve their performance. A questionnaire was administered to a group of Year 5 students at a school in England to solicit the pupils’ perceptions of the usefulness of written feedback and the challenges that were likely to be faced in interpreting and implementing the feedback. In order to measure the impact of feedback on students’ performance, a pre-test was given, pupils’ recommendations from the questionnaire were incorporated, and a second test was given two days later. The two sets of marks were then compared. It was found that pupils find it difficult to understand written feedback at times, mainly because of unfamiliar vocabulary used in the feedback and when they do understand the language, they often find it unhelpful in achieving their learning goals. Teachers are recommended to simplify and add more detail to feedback, making it as informative as possible about what was done well and suggest improvements that could be made.

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The performance of learners in 'O' level mathematics has been generally poor in Zimbabwe. There is evidence that learners have challenges in understanding and interrelating Geometric Transformation concepts as they are used in mathematics. Inappropriate pedagogical strategies of teaching the topic are viewed as the main causes of the problem. This backdrop prompted the authors to enquire the effectiveness of GeoGebra as a pedagogical tool in teaching and learning Geometric Transformations (GT) at 'O' level, as contrasted to traditional teaching methods used by most classroom practitioners. A real classroom set up involving the control and experimental groups of learners was used to carry out the study. The mixed methods approach used, incorporated semi-structured interviews for mathematics teachers, while written pre and post tests for both groups of learners were administered. The outcomes of this study show that although the traditional methods had a positive impact on learners' performance, the use of GeoGebra improved their performance more in GT. Based on these findings the study recommends that for effective and quality learning in GT, teachers should embrace virtual manipulatives to conduct mathematics instruction as it is likely to enhance the mastery and retention of concepts as reflected in the study.