Research on digital resources for organizing STEM education in elective courses with integrated content in Ukrainian schools
Authors: Nazarenko Tetiana 
Published: February 2025

Every year, various changes occur on planet Earth. Robotics appears, both in production and in everyday life, 3D printers, driverless cars, drones, the development of augmented reality and artificial intelligence, etc. Various innovations have also affected the education system of Ukraine. Forms, methods, teaching aids, the role of teachers and students, curricula and assessment systems are changing. With the modernization of the educational process, new directions in education are emerging. For example, today you can hear about blended, inverted, mobile, social learning, video scribing, cloud technologies, flipped classroom, storytelling, start-up challenge, etc. In connection with the spread of coronavirus infection and active military operations in the territory of Ukraine, distance learning has been introduced, which requires certain skills from both teachers and students. It is worth being able to use various gadgets to complete educational tasks, communicate with parents, students, colleagues, etc. Today, another educational reform is underway in Ukraine, which is supported by state educational documents, in particular, the approved concept of STEM education, which involves the integration of natural sciences and emphasizes the development of new technologies, mathematical calculations, and innovative thinking. In this context, the educational process is reoriented to the development of the individual, and such a reorientation involves improving the entire education system, and therefore, the methods of teaching individual disciplines, including natural sciences. To do this, it is necessary to calculate various aspects of implementing STEM education in the educational process of general secondary education institutions in Ukraine, which in the future should satisfy the country’s needs for qualitatively trained STEM education specialists. Therefore, scientists from the Institute of Pedagogy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine are conducting relevant research, including on the topic of implementing the Concept of STEM education and educational STEM technologies in the educational process of general secondary education institutions. As a result of the study, it was found that the most acceptable is the use of integrated content of various elective courses that are of an extracurricular nature. Thus, using various gadgets that are used in the educational process in elective courses, we came to the conclusion that digital technologies of augmented reality are the most effective. The purpose of the scientific work of scientists of the National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine is to analyze the implementation of STEM education in the educational process of Ukrainian schools and its impact on the formation of key and subject competencies in students, in our case—geographical ones. The pedagogical experiment was supposed to last three years from September 2020 to June 2023, but the military actions that began on the territory of our state suspended it in February 2022. It was attended by 923 teachers and 4750 students who chose STEM teaching through elective courses.