The implementation of an integrated approach of STEM education with real-life scenarios is crucial to motivate students to learn and to better prepare them for real-world challenges, which is a big challenge for teachers. Therefore, there are implications for teaching practice and consequently the need for professional development. This paper presents an integrated approach of STEM education developed in the context of a collaborative professional development programme implemented in an exclusive online context, provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic. The programme aimed at providing teachers with knowledge and skills to develop STEM integrated tasks to be implemented in class. This study used a quantitative–qualitative approach to answer the research questions, using mixed methods to collect data. Participants are primary school teachers who participated in the programme during four months in the school year 2020/2021. Based on data collected from questionnaires, participant observation and teachers’ final reports, it was verified that teachers recognized the importance of obtaining training in STEM education and that this type of professional development was very relevant and improved their knowledge and skills to implement STEM hands-on practices in class. In addition, a case study of a science and mathematics 6th grade teacher is presented to illustrate how she implement integrated STEM tasks in class based on a real-world scenario such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, teachers recognized the importance of this approach and that it increases students’ motivation to learn.

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Scientific research involves mathematical modelling in the context of an interactive balance between theory, experiment and computation. However, computational methods and tools are still far from being appropriately integrated in the high school and university curricula in science and mathematics. In this chapter, we present a new way to develop computational modelling learning activities in science and mathematics which may be fruitfully adopted by high school and university curricula. These activities may also be a valuable instrument for the professional development of teachers. Focusing on mathematical modelling in the context of physics, we describe a selection of exploratory and interactive computational modelling activities in introductory mechanics and discuss their impact on student learning of key physical and mathematical concepts in mechanics.

This article is a short introduction on how to use Modellus (a computer package that is freely available on the Internet and used in the IOP Advancing Physics course) to build physics games using Newton's laws, expressed as differential equations. Solving systems of differential equations is beyond most secondary-school or first-year college students. However, with Modellus, the solution is simply the output of the usual physical reasoning: define the force law, compute its magnitude and components, use it to obtain the acceleration components, then the velocity components and, finally, use the velocity components to find the coordinates. M This article features online multimedia enhancements