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We introduce Ricerca Operativa Applicazioni Reali (ROAR; in English, Real Applications of Operations Research), a three-year project for higher secondary schools. Its main aim is to improve students’ interest, motivation, and skills related to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics disciplines by integrating mathematics and computer science through operations research. ROAR offers examples and problems closely connected with students’ everyday life or with the industrial reality, balancing mathematical modeling and algorithmics. The project is composed of three teaching units, addressed to grades 10, 11, and 12. The implementation of the first teaching unit took place in Spring 2021 at the scientific high school IIS Antonietti in Iseo (Brescia, Italy). In particular, in this paper, we provide a full description of this first teaching unit in terms of objectives, prerequisites, topics and methods, organization of the lectures, and digital technologies used. Moreover, we analyze the feedback received from students and teachers involved in the experimentation, and we discuss advantages and disadvantages related to distance learning that we had to adopt because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this paper, we continue describing the project and the experimentation of Ricerca Operativa Applicazioni Reali (ROAR; in English, Real Applications of Operations Research), a three-year project for higher secondary schools, introduced. ROAR is composed of three teaching units, addressed to Grades 10, 11, and 12, respectively, having the main aim to improve students’ interest, motivation, and skills related to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics disciplines by integrating mathematics and computer science through operations research. In a previous paper, we reported on the design and implementation of the first unit, started in Spring 2021 at the scientific high school IIS Antonietti in Iseo (Brescia, Italy), in a Grade-10 class. Here, we focus on the second unit, carried out in Winter/Spring 2022 with the same students, now in a Grade-11 class. In particular, we describe objectives, prerequisites, topics and methods, the organization of the lectures, digital technologies used, and a challenging final project. Moreover, we analyze the feedback from students and teachers involved in the experimentation. Funding: G. Colajanni and E. Taranto were partially supported by the research projects Programma Ricerca di Ateneo UNICT 2020-22 linea 2, EEEP&DLaD, and OMNIA, respectively, of the University of Catania. The research of G. Colajanni was also partially supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research and the European Union for the PON project on Research and Innovation 2014–2020 [Grant D.M. 1062/2021]. A. Raffaele was partially supported by the Gruppo Nazionale per il Calcolo Scientifico. These supports are gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ited.2023.0001 .