In order to deepen students' understanding of STEM education concepts, to foster robust support for educational innovation, and to improve the teaching skills and professionalism of our Master of Education, on the afternoon of May 14, 2024, graduate students of the Class of 2023 Subject Teaching (Biology) class, led by Prof. Kaibin Xie, Vice Dean of the School of Teacher Education, listened to a keynote lecture by Prof. Winnie M. So of the Hong Kong University of Education, titled " STEM Integration in Primary Schools: theory, implementation and impact".

Firstly, Professor So Wing-mui introduced to us the Hong Kong Government's policy report on STEM education, which said, "The Education Bureau (EDB) will modernize and enrich science, technology and mathematics curricula and learning activities, and strengthen teacher training to enable primary and secondary school students to develop their creative potential to the full." , "The Education Bureau should endeavor to promote STEM education by providing additional resources in primary schools and is prepared to offer a one-time grant of $200,000 to each public secondary school to facilitate the implementation of school-based programmes related to STEM education." The report shows that the Hong Kong government has attached more importance to STEM education, and the financial support invested has risen, with a series of initiatives proposed to actively promote STEM education. Through the specific report, Professor So Wing Mui made the students raise the importance of STEM education.

Professor Su Yongmei then analysed some of the misconceptions and existing problems in STEM education through comparative analysis. For example, some people believe that "integration is not necessary at all" and that there is inequitable representation of disciplines, with "science being the main focus, maths being under-represented and engineering being a silent member". By citing these issues, it became clear that STEM education is still evolving, and that we need to raise awareness, utilise collaborative learning strategies, develop self-directed learning strategies, take into account affective factors, and delve deeper into STEM integration.

In addition, Professor Su Yongmei introduced and explained a series of research literature on STEM integration education to demonstrate more intuitively the shortcomings of existing research on STEM integration education and what can be learnt from it. The shortcomings are broadly as follows: 1) There was no extensive review of STEM integration within the first few years of the study. 2) Teachers did not teach students to understand what was needed or interfere with students' work. 3) There were few studies that used need fulfilment to explain how community-based learning could foster interest and buy-in to STEM in STEM-integrated education. 4) There was a lot of research on the use of need fulfilment in STEM-integrated education. However, there is much to learn and reflect on in this literature, such as: 1. the use of audio and video recordings of group interactions and whole-class discussions. 2. the use of a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses. 3. the derivation of recommendations for striking a balance between hands-on and minds-on in design-based learning in STEM.

Professor Wing-Mui So also introduced the future direction of research and implementation of STEM integration. Through a series of charts and graphs, she showed that the future of STEM integration will enable learning activities to be increasingly unstructured and focused on solving real-life problems, and that future research will explore the impacts of modelling-based STEM learning on different learning outcomes, further research on the impacts of STEM learning on students' higher-order thinking and STEM identity, and design more rigorous experiments.

At the end of the lecture, Prof Su Yongmei also interacted with the students and patiently answered their questions. Students expressed that through this lecture, they had a deeper understanding of the knowledge related to STEM integration, and it also stimulated their enthusiasm for exploring STEM education.

The lecture not only provided a rare learning opportunity for the postgraduate students of Class 2023 Subject Teaching (Biology) class, but also provided useful reference for the College to promote STEM education. Professor So Wing Mui of the Hong Kong University of Education's special lecture undoubtedly brought a feast of knowledge to our teachers and students, and we look forward to more experts and scholars coming to campus in the future to discuss the road of educational innovation with us!