Developing STEAM activities regarding the subject area of physical events in secondary school science course

STEAM education, which is an approach that integrates science, technology, mathematics, engineering and art disciplines, is becoming more and more common all over the world. This approach has also been used in our country in recent years. In the research, it was aimed to develop STEAM activities for the physical events subject area of the secondary school science course, which can also be used as a guide material for teachers. The study was carried out within the framework of the technical scientific/collaborative action research approach, which is the action research type of qualitative research methods. In order to ensure the validity of the material development process, expert evaluation, one-on-one assessment and pilot evaluation were made. In the expert evaluation, firstly 20 STEAM activities were developed by the researcher. The developed activities have been reduced to 12 activities by presenting the opinions of 5 expert faculty members in the field of science education. Then, formal arrangements were made in accordance with the opinions of 10 science teachers. After receiving expert opinion, a pre-pilot was conducted with 4 students from each grade level for one-on-one evaluation. After the preliminary pilot application, the pilot evaluation was carried out for 5 weeks with 48 students studying in the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grades of Elazig Mezre Secondary School in the 2021-2022 academic year by editing the deficiencies. After the pilot implementation, the activities were finalized. In the study, semi-structured interviews and researcher observations were used as data collection tools. Interviews with teachers and researcher observations were analyzed by descriptive analysis, and semi-structured interviews with students were analyzed by content analysis. It has been seen that the developed STEAM activities can be used within the scope of science, engineering and entrepreneurship applications that should be applied at the end of the science course units, are suitable for the student level and the gains in the program, and can be easily applied without experiencing material and time problems. In addition, it was found that the STEAM activities developed with the pilot application contributed to the students in terms of cognitive, affective and skills, and the STEAM activities developed in accordance with the researcher observations contributed to the scientific process and 21st century skills of the students. It is thought that the developed STEAM activities will increase the use of science, engineering and entrepreneurship applications at the end of the unit, and will increase the applicability of STEAM activities suitable for class levels within the subject area of physical events without experiencing time problems.