Currently, significant changes that actively take place in modern Russian society affect all spheres of its development. Today, due to economic globalization and high rates of innovative technologies development special attention is paid to the education system, where profound changes occur. Today, the educational process is focused on the development of personal characteristics that meet the requirements of a modern educated person. In this regard, the task of educational institutions is to adapt the educational process to today's realities. Modern school is based on the principles of effective ways of professional and personal qualities development. To achieve this goal, special attention should be paid to the need for renewal and natural science education. One of the directions of innovative activity at the lessons of natural-mathematical cycle of secondary education is STEM education. It helps children to delve into the logic of the events, understand their relationships, systematically explore the world and thereby generate curiosity, engineering style of thinking, the ability to get out of critical situations, to develop teamwork skills and learn the basics of management and self-presentation, which, in turn, provides a fundamentally new level of personal development. Key words: science education, STEM education, innovation, technology, robotics, microcontrollers, sensors, programming.

The work is devoted to development of technical vision system for the concentration tables. It is shown that new technologies applied to the design of concentration tables will significantly help companies, specializing in extraction and handling of common minerals in deep processing of construction sands in order to obtain more expensive products. Technical vision hardware and software complex is considered as one of automation systems, that can greatly improve productivity of concentration tables, provide energy, human and essential mineral resource saving (e.g. of such minerals as titanium-zirconium raw material). Described is the mechanism of different fractions dividing on the concentration table. Shown is the process of dividing line recognition by technical vision system. Depicted is the system structure and the used elements. Pictured is the software general operation including camera image analysis before making decisions and hardware control.

This paper is devoted to combining ecology challenges and STEM technologies. We consider ecology as an integral part of STEM process. The including of ecology in the STEM allows not only to develop mathematician calculations and engineering skills but also forms students’ ecological consciousness. The attempt to combine ecology and STEM is aimed to make the knowledge in ecological sphere more practical. STEM education can help in solving the main ecological problems and challenges. STEM lessons, projects, conferences, exchanges could explain and give a living example of damages caused to our planet by irrational using of natural resources. It can improve public awareness and show the careful attitude to our planet.

Objectives. The purpose of the work was to change the method of signal transmission containing metrological information from industrial time-pulse ultrasonic gas flow meter to a compu-ting device (CD). It was planned to expand the range of devices serving as gas flow calculators. A hardware-software complex (HSC) for automatic calibration / verification of ultrasonic flowmeters was to be developed. This HSC should work equally well on different operating systems. The information exchange between the CD and the flowmeter was to be carried out wirelessly.Method. The Wi-Fi Pro-tocol was used as a wireless Protocol. The energy-efficient ESP8266 controller was chosen as micro-controller to provide the functionality of Wi-Fi. The ESP8266 board acted as a Wi-Fi access point on the network to which CD was connected for data exchange. The ESP8266 microcontroller also served as a HTTP server. Exchange of metrological and other information was carried out by GET-requests. Given the need for continuous flow measurements and simultaneous communication between the user and the flow meter, requests to the server were transmitted using AJAX technology. The software part of the APK consisted of 3 programs: a program that measured the flow and transmitted the information further to the ESP8266 microcontroller, a server program recorded in ESP8266, providing a response to the requests of CD users, and the client program installed on the CD. The article discusses the key points of the HSC.Result. As a result of this work, the HSC was processed for calibration/verification of ultrasonic gas flow meters. For the first time this process for industrial flow meters was implemented using the ESP8266Wi-Fi controller as an access point. As a WU, it became possible to use any desktop or laptop computer or mobile device with a modern browser.Conclusion. The method proposed in the paper significantly simplified the data exchange between the VU and the flowmeter, reduced the cost of software development due to the common approach for different operating systems.