United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals - SDGs include also the idea of sustainable education aimed to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Education strategies must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth while tackling climate change and working to preserve planet oceans and forests. Active learning methods applied in teaching STEM subjects at the technical universities might support these ideas. The miniPBL approach could be used in teaching difficult subjects as Physics, Chemistry or Mathematics, in particular. MiniPBL is an adapted PBL - Problem Based Learning method, successfully applied in teaching STEM subject with real life applications. Small practical problems are presented, which might be solved using basic knowledge of students of bachelor study programmes at technical universities. These students are not equipped with the sufficient professional knowledge from their respective scientific engineering fields to be able to solve complex applied problems. Nevertheless, they need to apply acquired theoretical knowledge from Physics and Mathematics in order to develop mathematical models of the real-life situations and solve the complex problems in their engineering specializations. MiniPBL approach might remove these obstacles. We will present several examples of applied problems suitable for basic courses of Mathematics in bachelor study programmes at technical universities. All problems are related to SDG problems, such as clean water, climate action, life below water, life on land, deforestation, environmental issues, waste accumulation, etc. Each problem is presented with a short introduction about the issue to be solved, while respective topic that has to be covered when developing the mathematical model of the given information is shortly explained, too. Students solve these problems individually, while they are allowed to use any resources they might find available - Internet webpages, Artificial Intelligence, any Computer Algebra System (GeoGebra, Wolfram Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, etc. ) for calculations, or books, newspapers, lecture notes and all published papers related to the problem. Mathematical models that have to be used for the correct solutions are then presented, and individual students report on their solution methods. Final discussions are held at the end of the miniPBL sessions, in order to analyse the solved environmental problem itself, and to draw attention to the power of mathematical models that make it possible to search for possible solutions. We strongly believe that teaching mathematics based on SDGs - Sustainable Development Goals principles will result in the development of students´ deeper mathematical literacy, better calculation skills, experience in applying mathematical models to practical problems in engineering and critical thinking. Our aim is to bring up educated and responsible inhabitants of the planet taking care of its sustainable development, maintaining life on it, and preserving the diversity of all living species.

Keywords: Sustainable education, active learning methods, STEM subjects, mathematics.