Colocando a engenharia sobre a mesa uma atividade STEAM de engenharia reversa e matemática

Reverse engineering is explored as a didactic strategy for interdisciplinary between engineering and mathematics in primary education. In the first part, we theoretically scaffold STEAM education and Design-Based Learning (DBL) in the sense of reverse engineering. In the second part, we present a STEAM activity plan in which students do reverse engineering of a table and then select materials from a catalogue with contradictory demands of dimensions, price and sustainability. The description of this activity is accompanied by the results of its implementation with 23 students from a Spanish school. The activity is shown to be pedagogically powerful in terms of learning mathematics and engineering. Its simplicity and reproducibility (we provide a worksheet in an editable format) help teachers to understand that engineering is not limited to complex and costly approaches.