Engaging STEM Education for High School Student in Japan: Exploration of Perception to Engineer Profession

While Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM) education is expanding worldwide, engineering reminds as both valuable and difficult element to integrate. Understanding students’ perceptions of the engineer might be key to enhancing their interest in engineering careers in the future. These perceptions also could be a valuable insight to science educators who demand to develop more STEM activities. In our framework, a case study was used to explore the perceptions of 16 students as they participated in STEM activities at a Junior High School in Japan. After participating in the activities, students completed a questionnaire about the profession. Data analysis was guided by a focus on general perceptions of engineering, it’s clusters, and discussions of how it related to the literature and socio-cultural of Japan. Text analysis was conducted, especially in terms of frequency network and hierarchical cluster analysis. Our findings indicate that students’ perceptions were related to making or creating, technology, and machines. Five clusters of responses were found. The “design” and “solve the problem faced by society” clusters were influential. There were disparities between the students’ perceptions and the definition of engineering, especially regarding constraints and the use of science and mathematics concepts. Therefore, STEM education needs to be promoted especially in problem solving and designing activities to support positive perceptions in engineering profession.


INTRODUCTION
Preparing students to deal with future situations has become a continuous challenge for educators. As Integrating the engineering, mathematics and technology education in science classes is one of the realistic ways to do so. STEM education became promising approach to conduct that achieve positive perception from teachers (Khuyen et al. 2020 problem-solving skills (Syukri, Halim & Mohtar 2018). However, in many Asian countries, emerging engineering is a rare feature of the K-12 curriculum (Lee, Chai & Hong 2019;Ngan et al. 2020).
Therefore, researches related engineering are important to conduct to support STEM education in Asia.
There is a global concern that students appear to be unenthusiastic about science-related fields. In Japan, this issue has been gaining attention since the 1980s. Several projects attempted to address it, such as the Super Science High School program (Naganuma 2015) and     (Gries 2015).

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In concordance was conducted to check the context in which the word "making" was used.

Clusters of perceptions of the engineering profession
Although the result of the word frequency analysis revealed the words that students frequently used, how those words were connected remained unclear.
To understand more deeply how these words were used, a word frequency network analysis was completed, as shown in Figure 4. In this network, each word is illustrated as a node. The size of a node indicates the value of its degree.
In other words, the bigger the node, the more frequently that word was used in students' responses. Node degree is one of the key indicators to measure the importance of a node in the network (Li et al. 2018). In Figure 4, three nodes are bigger than the others. These are "making", "machine," and "technology". Higher centrality means that the node is more influential as a junction within the network (Brandes 2001). This is an important indicator, because it is possible for a node to be connected to many nodes in a cluster but have few connections to other clusters. In Figure 4, color gradation is used to show centrality. The darker the node, the more that word was a central idea. Even though the node "making" is bigger, the node "technology" has a higher centrality. Therefore, the word "technology" plays a central role that connects other nodes to explain students' perceptions of engineers.
As a result of the hierarchical cluster analysis, the software created a dendrogram that is shown in Figure 5.
The dendrogram shows which words were viewed as the most similar by placing these on branches that are close together. The dissimilarity line indicates the (dis)similarity among the words.
Words that join together sooner, such as "robot" and "AI," are more similar to each other than those that join later, such as "make" and "robot".  were adapted (Heisig 2007). Two sets of characters are used to express "engineer," as shown in Figure 6. Most of the JHS students in this study use the first set of characters, which is commonly used in younger students' textbooks. For example, in the students' 9 th -grade science textbook, one of the topics is "For the bright future of the earth: Nature, humans and technology," which uses this set of characters (Arima 2015). This set consists of two parts: the "technology" character and the "person" character.