A Lab of Hands-on STEM Experiments for Primary Teachers at CERN

In this paper, we present school science teaching and learning activities using large research infrastructures as tools for primary teachers eager to engage their students in cutting-edge physics and engineering research. The activities were deployed from 2016 to 2019 in the framework of a professional development course addressed to primary school teachers, which took place at CERN. We focus on a laboratory of electromagnetism which Greek teachers tested with their students after participating in the course. The Large Hadron Collider and the particle detectors at CERN served as exciting engineering paradigms. The laboratory introduced participants to learning-by-doing methodologies for conducting simple experiments that aimed to foster student learning. The proposed laboratory is examined in terms of its impact on both teachers' and students' knowledge regarding experiments and the construction of engineering models as well as on their basic understanding of scientific and engineering research.