The Engineering Design Process (EDP) is contemporary teaching method, applicable within STEM framework, and consists of a series of steps that students – as future engineers – follow, in order to design a prototype artifact and find a solution to a complex engineering problem. These steps usually include problem – solving processes, such as defining the problem, background research, specifying requirements, brainstorming, evaluating, choosing the best solution, developing a prototype, testing the prototype and finally communicating the research results. During the process, students engage themselves with all Computational Thinking (CT) dimensions. In this research, we apply EDP, within the STEM and CT Epistemology framework, in order to design and develop an open – hardware, open – source, low – cost, easy and safe to use, drown, for educational activities, in Higher education. The purpose of this work is to highly engage University students, in developing solutions for complex Mechatronic course - related problems, and evaluate how they achieved their learning objectives. We also design a use case scenario, in which students form proper engineering teams to work with the design of the UAV, to program its behavior and to understand avionics. The simple design, safe use, economic cost, and open philosophy of this drone make it suitable not only for university courses, but also for educational robotics applications, and in STEM education in general, regardless of the educational level.

To justify the implementation of the integrated/holistic STEAM approach, theoretical considerations propose that assessment must be designed in order to evaluate students’ engagement not only in core ideas but also in their ability to be involved in the practices of Scientists and Engineers and in their capacity to recognize and apply the crosscutting concepts in real/authentic problems. The purpose of the article: (i) to summarize the state of the art for the different approaches of STEAM epistemology and integration, (ii) to go beyond and suggest some directions for future research related to the role of the boundary objects as crossing objects between the disciplines included in the acronym of STEAM and (iii) to discuss the new forms of learning objectives and the assessment techniques, when the boundary objects are considered in the STEAM integrated approach.

Research studies provide some evidence that computing and education robotics have a positive impact on female students' engagement in Computational Thinking (CT) practices and their self-efficacy for CT. Other issues raised by research concern the decontextualization of computing education from the actual lives of students which causes problems for students under represented in the fields of computing and engineering, such as female students. To tackle this problem, paper aimed to develop (STEM-Computational Thinking (CT)-Computing) scenarios related to students' actual lives and their local communities in order to help female students to develop STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) competences, when core disciplinary ideas and cross-cutting concepts are infused in the scenarios. All scenarios were implemented using the didactic model of inquiry teaching and learning and the engineering design thinking instruction strategy using physical computing activities. A validated questionnaire for self-efficacy and CT practices was applied before and after the intervention to female prospective engineering school teachers studying at Higher Education Institutes in Greece. Results show a strong evidence for the effectiveness (enhancement of CT efficacy of female students) by using the STEM content epistemology through activities implemented with physical computing platforms.

Approaches to STEM epistemology are related to the so-called “Integrated STEM Education Curriculum integration of STEM contents based in constructivism theories of learning as a context to implement the STEM epistemology. There are two approaches for STEM education integration: the content integration and the context integration. Computational Pedagogy is a didactic model that applies the Computational Science experiment in order to collect and analyze real- time data in alignment with the practices of Computational Thinking. In this work, the inquiry based teaching and learning strategy is implemented in order to measure the Hubble Universe expansion constant in agreement with the standard Scientific and Engineering practices as a computational experiment.