In many disciplines of STEM education, online experiments (OEs), commonly called remote-controlled experiments, become an emerging practice in technology-enhanced learning because of their many merits perceived in educational research. We recently formulated an innovative, low-cost, and open-source approach to developing new OEs rapidly. It won a gold medal and a special prize in an international innovation and invention competition in 2018. Using this new approach, teachers and students can easily access OEs with a lightweight web browser using any hardware and any operating system without installing additional software or apps. They can observe and/or control the experiments and collect authentic data (over a very short or long time) for further analysis by plotting graphs and/or conducting calculations to obtain important results. Some well-accepted instructional approaches or pedagogies have been integrated into online science/STEM experiments, which can also be aligned with school-based curricula to provide self-contained courseware for students’ online self-regulated learning. In this chapter, we will focus on whether OEs could really and effectively provide the essential elements of experimental learning to ‘school students’ as expected in traditional laboratory work. From our pilot implementation in four Hong Kong (HK) and Mainland China (CHINA) secondary schools with a total of 172 participants, we explored the OE experiences of different experiments and cognitive performance among students from different regions and genders using the conventional mixed methods research and design-based research. Students’ feedback and suggestions for improvement of the OEs were also analysed together with some specific implications for science/STEM education. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

The examination-oriented education, de-emphasis of hands-on practical work in science lessons and the lack of interdisciplinary curricula are some of the major constraints or obstacles for STEM education in China as reflected from their deficiency or ineffectiveness in nurturing gifted students or talents. In this presentation, we will report two different innovative ways to employ technology and field-based learning for effective STEM education as based on our prize-winning educational device (called mobile logger for science and environmental studies with a corresponding software/app called SESlogger). In the first case, a cartoon video was specifically developed for teaching the primary school students on how to use the device and then students were arranged to practice it for field-based learning in a Guangdong school campus. In the second case, the mobile logger was used to collect on-site environmental data for hiking through all the ten sections of the MacLehose Trail with a total distance of 100km and then the best section of the Trail was designed as a kind of technology-enhanced field trip for trial run by some university students in Hong Kong. To evaluate the educational effectiveness, students' attitudes and views towards the STEM lessons and activities have been collected using questionnaire survey (together with the pre-test and post-test scores on the students' cognitive understanding and level of practical performance) or interviews. For these two cases, we will also present the findings on students' learning difficulties and field-based implementation problems or issues together with reflections from the researchers themselves. Copyright © 2020 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.

Despite STEM education is highly advocated in Hong Kong schools, teachers and students are still lack of the relevant personal experience and practical training, especially in an informal learning environment. This paper reports on a new event of STEM Olympiad 2016 organized by The Education University of Hong Kong and supported by the Education Bureau of the HKSAR Government and other institutions, aiming at providing senior secondary school students with informal learning opportunities to deepen their understanding of STEM and reflecting on their interest towards pursuing further study in STEM subjects and career; and creating an atmosphere conducive to the teaching of STEM in secondary schools and heighten teachers' and students' awareness of the importance of STEM education. Students participating in the STEM Olympiad completed a “Knowledge Challenge” on both individual and team bases, and competed in the “Innovations in Practice Challenge” to solve the local wastewater treatment problems. Each team had to design, assemble and test a treatment system prototype to meet the design criteria and to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in STEM without prior training and preparation. Before the final challenge, a mass expert lecture was delivered by an experienced engineer to enrich students' knowledge in the wastewater treatment and its underlying scientific principles. A series of 11 parallel education forum and workshops were also held to raise participants' awareness of the importance of STEM education as attended by hundreds of teachers and students. The competition yielded a total of 36 gold, silver and bronze medals awarded to the competition winners. We conducted student and teacher questionnaire survey and interviews after the competition to collect data on their perceptions and opinions of the event. As expected, the feedback is generally positive in many aspects. In particular, the students widened their vision in STEM and the teachers also obtained a holistic

Recent educational research reveals that case studies can be applied in STEM education as a pedagogically powerful method for teaching scientific concepts and contents as well as science process skills. However, there exists very little research or literature on the instructional use of case study in STEM education in Hong Kong. Hence, a team of science educators and scientists initiated a collaborative project to investigate how feasible case study can be incorporated in STEM education. Over a period of seven months, we developed case teaching materials (including case story line with authentic data, worksheets for field trip and laboratory experiments, online/remote-controlled experiments, aerial movies filmed by drones and virtual reality videos etc.) for topics purposefully selected from (i) Hong Kong Wetland Park, (ii) two large sewage treatment plants/projects of the Drainage Services Department, and (iii) landfill gas used by the Town Gas company. This teaching approach was implemented in three different courses in our education university. A set of instrument for mixed research method was specifically developed or modified for collecting data on the learning effectiveness and feedback from a total of 115 students enrolled in the aforementioned three courses. Essential features of the case teaching materials and preliminary findings of the evaluation will be presented. The discussion on the difficulties encountered in the development and implementation stages as well as the direction for the future research and development work will be highlighted.

In response to the Hong Kong government’s call for renewing and enriching “the curricula and learning activities of Science, Technology and Mathematics, and enhance the training of teachers, thereby allowing primary and secondary students to fully unleash their potential in innovation”, the author collaborated with a team of science teacher educators and scientists to develop a new dual major science teacher education programme called Bachelor of Education in Science (BEd(Science)) which prepares competent graduates for teaching two senior secondary science subjects (physics, chemistry or biology) as well as the junior secondary science. Compared with the conventional Bachelor of Science (BSc) programme offered by many other universities, our BEd(Science) has the special programme features of not only offering three kinds of dual majors (physics + chemistry/chemistry + biology/biology + physics) but also deliberately integrating subject knowledge with pedagogical content knowledge in many science courses, practising pedagogy in field experience (to be conducted in school environment) and delivering the programme by a teaching team composed of both scientists and science educators. Apart from five foundation courses in science and science education, there are nine advanced science subject courses plus a subject-specific pedagogy course in each chosen major. Besides, our design of the curriculum content of the BEd(Science) programme is based on a detailed examination of the local school science curricula so that it is ensured to cover all the subject knowledge necessary for the effective teaching of the corresponding school science subject. Hence, those advanced science courses or topics such as advanced quantum mechanics, which are usually required for specific scientific research but are not relevant nor required for the teaching of secondary science, will be replaced by other educational courses or topics which could effectively help school pupils remove their common

It has been estimated that there are globally over 20 million people using various features of the Internet. In particular, the World Wide Web(WWW) is developing very rapidly, especially for business application and it consists of interlinked hypermedia documents for retrieving and displaying information in form of text, pictures, audio, video and even interactive simulation. From an educator' s point of view, there are three main advantageous features of the WWW that can make it very special for educational usage: First, the teaching materials in hypermedia form are accessible around the world through networked personal computers and so the temporal and spatial constraint of classroom teaching are removed. Second, the multimedia features of the WWW documents (represented by Hypertext Markup Language, HTML) are well-known to be effective for presentation/ transmission of ideas and factual information. Third, the hyperlinkage of WWW documents provides not only links (i.e. WWW addresses or locations) to other documents as instantaneously accessible references but also a mode of nonlinear learning which resembles the association operation of human mind. However, the concept of teaching through the Internet has rarely been put into practice in the sub-degree level according to our knowledge in the Science discipline. Therefore, we have employed a simple model to establish a WWW home-page (located at http://www.hkstar.com/~hkiedsci) of a self-learning package on Introductory Digital Electronics for our HKIEd Science students enrolled in various types and modes of courses as well as for those AS/AL Physics students in Hong Kong. Apart from some qualitative feedback obtained from email, we have issued an evaluation questionnaire to every science student concerned to collect his/her suggestions for improvement of the contents of the topic and the design of the home-page and to reflect the student' s receptivity of learning through the Internet. The main results of our survey

The name ‘CRUCIAL’ stands for Center for Resources and Understanding of Cross-curricular Instruction and Learning. Project Crucial was fully funded by The Hong Kong Institute of Education and started to operate in 1997. the project was launched because it is believed that Cross-curricular Education is urgently needed for present-day education in Hong Kong. In addition, the Chief Executive’s devotion to develop IT (information Technology) aided education has further confirmed the feasibility of establishing a Center for Cross-curricular education. Crucial was initiated, therefore, as a development of cross-curricular subject interaction and delivery by means of networked resources through the Internet. The URL is http://crucial.ied.edu.hk. The principle is to use computer networking to support curriculum enhancement, resource sharing, and access to remote databases, to improve local education from primary to secondary level. In a previous paper about the vision and reality of IT in education, it was found that school teachers’ perception of CRUCIAL and the use of learning technologies in classrooms are very positive. In this paper the feedback from ~150 students will be analysed and described. The feedback from students was obtained from a questionnaire survey. The questionnaire is divided into two parts. The first part contains fixed response items that focus on the respondents’ attitude towards the effectiveness of the project while the second part contains open-ended questions for them to elaborate their opinions further.