Products From Building an Engineering Model for Stem Education Activity

The aim of this study is to examine whether the purpose of the Engineering Model Eliciting Activities (EngMEAs) are to be used as a tool to bridge engineering and school mathematics in the transition to STEM education. To this end, researchers have developed "Traffic Lights Problem", which has an interdisciplinary nature, working with mathematics teacher. This problem was applied to two groups of 3 and 4 students studying in the 7th grade in a city center in the eastern region of Turkey in the 2017-2018 academic year. In the process of solving the problem, the students used mathematics, science, technology and engineering knowledge in an integrated structure and introduced their own mathematical and scientific ideas and supported these ideas with in-group discussions and presented different models (products). The models of the students were different from each other because of students’ first exposure to such a process, different way of thoughts in the groups and inherent complexity of the modelling problems. In the light of the findings, it was concluded that the traffic lights modeling problem had an interdisciplinary nature, and this problem may have an important function for STEM education.