The Design And Development Of STEM Education Curriculum System Based On Informal Environment

STEM is the abbreviation of four words, science, technology,engineering, and mathematics, which is a fusion of science, technology,engineering, and mathematics. STEM education is a novel educational concept which emphasizes cultivating student's implementing ability,creative ability and abilities of solving practical problems using cross-disciplinary knowledge. STEM education in an informal environment,which can make up for the weakness of formal environment such as less opportunities for students, focusing on theory but ignore the practice and simple assessment, is becoming a trend due to the fact that it provides students with an immersive learning experience. Therefore, STEM education in informal environment has been studied in this paper.Firstly, the concepts of STEM education and informal learning environment are differentiated by literature research. Based on the characteristics of informal learning environment, seven principles of STEM education curriculum system are produced and curriculum system which contains flow chart and curriculum matrix are designed and introduced according to the principles.Secondly, according to the five elements of teaching model, this study analyses the teaching mode of STEM education in informal environment in five aspects, theoretical foundation, teaching goal, teaching procedure,practice condition and the evaluation standard, and then proposes a set of teaching model fitting for STEM education in informal environment. The characteristics of mobile educational resources in informal environment,which composed of educative and interactive, etc., are analyzed and the design tools of mobile educational resources are compared -and discussed.Moreover, curriculum cases are developed under the guidance of STEM curriculum teaching model and experiments -are. carried out in informal environment. This study elaborates one of the courses as an example.Finally, we conclude the contents and results of this research, further discuss the shortcomings of this study, the limits of informal environment and the lacking of validation for designed curriculum, and then forecast the prospect of STEM education.