Fostering High School Students’ Innovative Thinking and Design with STEM: Smart School Projects on IT Maker Day

Abstract

Technology and engineering have disrupted our daily lives and provided a better quality of lives through innovation. In the school system, students are not well promoted to integrate the knowledge from different subjects; consequently, they could not take this potential to address the real context of problems and situations. To enable this, it not only involves the strategy to integrate such subjects, but it also requires the innovative thinking and design. Based on this direction, therefore, this study endeavored to propose an approach that integrates the advantages of technology, STEM, and innovation through the means of constructing projects. In this study, the annual program of IT Maker Day on the smart school project theme has been implemented based on the proposed model. The participating students went through many hands-on experience workshops, design and developed their project in order to address their school or nearby community issues. The evaluation of this study has been made through their presentation on the final competition day where the committee investigates their works and gives suggestions on two dimensions of innovative thinking and design, and STEM. The results have shown that those who were awarded had better ideas and understanding on both dimensions. The implication of this study can be applied in other schools while the activities can be changed in their context; moreover, more investigation could be carried out for a better understanding of this learning phenomena.