ابزار آموزشی جدید برای تشویق فعالیت دانش آموزان دبیرستان در STEM new educational tools to encourage high-school students’ activity in stem

INTRODUCTION Education in the sphere of scientific disciplines is a foundation in training of experts for high-tech industries. Because of that many countries – such as Australia, China, UK, Israel, South Korea, Singapore and USA – currently implement state-funded STEM programs – Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics [1,2,3]. In Russia, such STEM centers have been opened at several universities, centers of technical support of education, and techno-parks, in cooperation with businesses, e.g. with support from Intel. Such centers represent a network of research laboratories that support scientific, technological and engineering input into auxiliary educational programs of high-school students. This project is aimed to increase interest among high-school students towards engineering and technical majors and to motivate senior students to continue education in scientific and technological fields. STEM laboratories make modern equipment and innovative programs more accessible for children who are interested in research activity1 . One of the directions in modernizing Russian secondary education system is setting various profiles – specializations in education – which has to meet the educational needs of students, reach the goals of personspecific education, and raise the level of achievement of scientific disciplines 2 . Introduction of specialized education in modern high-school makes it possible to select individual education trajectory, while profiled education allows a student to familiarize themselves with chosen profession. One of the problems in modern school during the modernization period is lack of strong inter-disciplinary connections. Often a student who is quite successful in one discipline cannot utilize received knowledge neither in real life, nor in other disciplines. The main reason is in secondary education attention is paid to acquisition of knowledge whilst the later stage of development in our society is to prepare a graduate to use such knowledge in real-life situations. Because of this it is very important to make a transition of competency education into high schools. The introduction of profiled education into high school requires a change in social requirements, developing new approaches, new content, new forms and methods and also new educational methods of teaching high-school disciplines of scientific nature [4,5].