No abstract

Water issues, a commonly discussed issue in water STEM education, present students with a challenge to put their engineering design skills to the test in a STEM project. This study aimed to enhance and examine Grade 8 students’ creative thinking in the water STEM education learning unit. It involved purposively selected 45 eight-graders enrolled in a school situated in Khon Kaen, Thailand. The study was carried out in three weeks which equate to twelve hours of learning covered in six lesson plans. Applying the interpretive paradigm, this study adapted Barak and Doppelt (2000)’s Creative Thinking Scale (CTS) to assess students’ applying knowledge and creative thinking. The findings likely demonstrated that most of the portfolio elements may be interpreted for the attainment of creative thinking in layer of awareness, while some others could be viewed layers of observation, strategy, and reflection. This paper clarifies what and how students’ project could be interpreted in each layer of creative thinking. Further implications for setting up STEM education in school setting are proposed.

Thailand Office of Basic Education Commission (OBEC) has pushed in-service teachers to develop his or her competence of organizing STEM education instruction. Another solution of increasing STEM in-service teacher is provide pre-service science teachers to generate their ideas of organizing learning activities and carried out research about STEM education during their teaching practice. This study aimed to examine pre-service science teachers’ conceptions of STEM education. The participants included 10 pre-service science teachers who enrolled school internship course of Khon Kaen University for teaching practice in schools. These participants will be supervised by the author. On the way of supervising, participants have meeting to generate the ideas of STEM education learning activities and research about STEM education on Friday afternoon for every week. Methodology regarded interpretive paradigm. Pre-service teachers’ conceptions of STEM education will be interpreted participant observation, interview, STEM education lesson plan, teaching performance, and other tasks. Data collection was carried out for 4 months. The data will be interpreted to examine the categories of pre-service teachers’ conceptions of STEM education. The findings will clarify what their perception on STEM education, and what and how they generate ideas for developing lesson plan; to integrate science, mathematics, and others for practicing in context; and to provide engineering practices and engineering design of technologies as the context. Their ideas of research about STEM education also reflect what they emphasize to develop students’ 21st century skills, and provide instruction requiring the context of problem solving in the real world or task through teamwork. The paper may have implication for developing pre-service STEM teachers.

The paper will clarify STEM education learning activity of designing biogas from animal’s dung. This activity was developed based on Sutaphan and Yuenyong [13] the context-based STEM education learning approach. The activity will start from identification of social issue of biogas that comes from animal dung and how to design biogas from animal’s dung. The possible solution will be introduced to the students to enhance them to develop the prototypes. Then, the lesson plan will provide activities regarding on the 7 stages of Sutaphan and Yuenyong [13] the context-based STEM education in order to scaffold students to practice knowledge for designing prototypes or products through engineer design process. The lesson plan will provide students to develop and use their integration of knowledge through biogas producing activity. For examples, physics (density of gases that lighter than air), biology (type of animal’s dung that fit and efficient for biogas), chemistry (composition of gas and dung), technology (design a tank that collect biogas from animal’s dung), engineering (how to make a gas separated by animal’s dung and flow it to the kitchen), mathematics (calculate the range of tank, pipe, and location to place the dung), financial issue (how to make an efficient biogas with a cheap cost). This paper may have implications for designing STEM education learning activities and adding value of local raw materials by using STEM education.

The paper will clarify the learning activities of eco-friendly fashion STEM education lesson plan. The activities were designed based on Sutaphan and [11] context based STEM education learning approach. This learning activities aim to foster student think profoundly in investigating the current new challenge (control the growth of the wasted clothes using an eco-friendly fashion system) in the society using STEM approach and the sandpit research or project as the model. The paper will discuss how to provide students chance to applying STEM knowledge through these activities.