A Design Framework for Interdisciplinary Communities of Practice Towards STEM Learning in 2nd Level Education

Abstract

Modern societies need young people who are able to think creatively, to collaborate well across multiple disciplines and to use new scientific, technical and engineering knowledge to achieve effective results. This brings a requirement for better teaching and learning approaches that can operate through a real world perspective where complex systems and problems are all around us. This paper describes the development of a framework designed to empower 2nd level teachers to achieve this by using Ubiquitous, Mobile, and Internet of Things technologies to enhance their approaches to teaching engineering and science subjects to their students. We provide a methodology and design approach towards forming and developing a Community of Practice (CoP), as a knowledge management schema for this and we describe exemplars from the engineering domain to illustrate the approach.