Development of STEM Curriculum for Digital Electronics Education in Secondary School

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education is crucial, rising the demand for technological skills driven by the Industry 4.0 digital transformation, and fostering problem-solving, autonomy, computational thinking, creativity, innovation, and effective teamwork skills. To properly address the lack of structured materials in secondary schools, an Educational Design Research (EDR) project was developed to introduce young students to STEM, and particularly to electronics field. For this purpose, the developed approach combines instructionism and constructionism methods, through three educational projects and "Drops of knowledge" modules. The developed material was applied to 9th and 12th grades of a secondary school, with the achieved results showing that this immersive approach effectively provides students with the necessary competencies to tackle the initial technological challenges of electronics. The project was recognized by the Directorate General of Education of Portugal as a recommended practice of a digital initiative within secondary schools.