Design activities are gaining interest as rich contexts for learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. STEM teachers may find this challenging however, as designing requires support that they are not used to providing. In a subject like chemistry, teachers would have to balance creativity and responsibility for the…

This study reports on a way to address twenty-first-century skills in mathematics education by organizing one-day mathematics challenges in the Netherlands. During such a day, students work in teams in school on an open-ended problem which aims to elicit skills like problem-solving, modeling, collaboration, and communication. The framework and the…

Teaching a hands- and minds-on course, in which feedback is essential in order to learn, is difficult, especially in times of COVID-19 where student progression cannot be monitored directly. During the lockdown period, the workshops of an undergraduate Design Engineering course had to be transferred to the home situation, which required a redesign…

This paper aims at presenting the experience of the Power Conversion project in teaching students to design a proof-of-principle contactless energy transfer system for the charging of electrical vehicles. The Power Conversion is a second-year electrical engineering (EE) project in which students are to gather and apply EE knowledge to design and…

Iteration during the design process is an essential element. Engineers optimize their design by iteration. Research on iteration in Primary Design Education is however scarce; possibly teachers believe they do not have enough time for iteration in daily classroom practices. Spontaneous playing behavior of children indicates that iteration fits in…

The CEFR encourages teachers to resort to task-based activities in the language classroom. However, some resistance has been offered to this approach, due to lack of appropriate training and difficulty in meeting some basic practical conditions, as well as in finding resources and examples of good practices, as shown in a survey conducted within…

This paper addresses the composite question of whether it is better in vocational education to allow students to design their own models and guide them while doing so, or to provide them with ready-made models. To answer this question we set up a design experiment in which students were asked to work on real-life assignments, guided by teachers in…