STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) involves the study of, and coherent integration among, various academic disciplines, especially the four cardinal disciplines of STEM. It has been advocated that STEM education is becoming even more important to preparing students for work in the technologically advanced world. Also, STEM education is vital for the nation’s competitiveness in the global economy. Therefore, STEM education has been widely recognized as one of the central parts in the education reform movement. To make STEM education effective, the use of innovative and digital technologies, such as online interactive learning environments and systems, digital games, augment reality (AR), mobile app., simulations and animations, and sensor-based tools and robots in STEM education should be an important research issues. These technologies have been applied in many and different ways to assist students and teachers in the rhythm of learning and teaching process for STEM education. Such digital technologies call for partnerships in which pedagogies are involved in instructional reform. Clearly, the effectiveness of innovative and digital technologies is also closely connected to the pedagogy through which they are employed. Therefore, the focus of any technology-related teaching and learning should not be on the digital technology itself, but on how digital technologies can pedagogically use to improve students’ STEM learning.
To address this important issue, this workshop aims to explore the application of innovative educational technologies and pedagogies in STEM education from both research and practice perspectives.
STEM education and educational technology are two growing research fields both with great potential. The studies in the application of innovative educational technologies in STEM education can facilitate the integration of theories and practices in STEM education and educational technologies, and provide insights into the use of innovative educational technologies to help learners’ learning outcomes derived from STEM education. From ICCE 2012 to ICCE2015, the first, the second, the third, and the forth workshops on application of innovative educational technologies in STEM education were held successfully. The value of the workshop was recognized and received widely positive feedbacks from the participants. They suggest and continue to appeal for more workshop series. In recent years, more and more educators and researchers in environmental education are trying to integrate environmental education into STEM education, focusing on what we call “E-STEM” (Environment, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). Besides, computer-supported visualization, modeling, and simulations are frequently used for STEM learning. Therefore, in the 4 th workshop, we tried to integrate the other two workshops held in ICCE 2014, “The 1st Workshop on application of advanced technologies in environmental education” and “Computer-Supported Visualization, Modeling, and Simulations for Learning.”
In the meantime, the 3rd workshop on Emerging Pedagogies for Computer-based Learning held in ICCE2016 was organized to building harmonization of pedagogy and computer technology as active approach to the process of in improving teaching, learning, and assessment for any subject matters. To build up a larger and stronger academic community of ICCE’s workshop, we integrated the forth workshop held in ICCE 2015 and the third one held in ICCE2016 together and organize a workshop on Technology-Enhanced STEM Education (TeSTEM Workshop) in ICCE2017 at Canterbury, New Zealand, as the 5th workshop. We continue organize a workshop on Technology-Enhanced STEM Education in ICCE2018 and ICCE2019. In this workshop, we held a successful workshop where it is aimed to provide an interactive channel for interdisciplinary researchers, teachers, and software developers to present full or short papers, to communicate and discuss with one another on relevant issues regarding technology-enhanced E-STEM education.
In light of aforesaid, we would like to propose the 8th TeSTEM Workshop in conjunction with ICCE2020, and we believe ICCE2020 participants will get interested in this issue, and those researchers who had relevant experience of this issue can also share and interact with one another in this workshop. STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) involves the study of, and coherent integration among, various academic disciplines, especially the four cardinal disciplines of STEM, and E-STEM involves the environmental education as integral part of conventional STEM.
Mini-conference
This workshop will be a mini-conference. Paper presentations, discussions, and demonstrations will be scheduled in the workshop. TeSTEM is joined with ICCE2020. All accepted papers will appear in one volume of workshop proceedings with ISBN and will be indexed by Elsevier Bibliographic Database for inclusion in SCOPUS .