Şehit Mustafa Sarı Secondary School – Turkey

Şehit Mustafa Sarı Secondary School is located in the town of Toroslar in Mersin. Our institution has been serving since 1929. There are 680 students, 49 teachers, 3 administrators and 3 servant staff in our school. Our students’ parents are composed of families with low social status, limited economic possibilities and different cultural perspectives. Our school is a school where refugees and students from many different cultural and ethnic groups get education. The fact that students came by immigration creates a disadvantage for high success. In addition, 112 of our students come from the dormitories. In order to acquire the skills of the digital age we are in, our teachers receive in-service or online STEM trainings and they provide different outcomes to students by doing interdisciplinary applications in their lessons. Coding activities are carried out in informatics lessons. With the encouragement of our teachers in the field of Coding and STEM applications, which have become widespread with the developing technology, we try to provide students education on this subject at the request of our parents. During our European Coding Week at our school, 180 students were given coding training by our teachers and expert staff working at the university. With this training, students have become a little closer with the technology and turned to digital thinking. 8 teachers from our school participated in the “STEM Teacher Academy” project carried out by the Çukurova Development Agency’s Technical Support Program in January 2019. Our teachers participated in information and practices on “STEM approach, scientific research design, project and problem-based STEM activities sample practices, preparing STEM lesson plan” in the 5-day training.