Humanity faces risks in an unpredictable world, being urgent to redefine Education to face common challenges (UNESCO, 2022). Faced with these challenges, several researchers in the area, such as Vieira, Tenreiro-Vieira, Martins (2011), defend a Science Education (SE) that integrates scientific knowledge into everyday contexts, promoting a contextualized approach to science teaching. This perspective aims to construct applicable and transferable knowledge of Science and Technology, promoting Critical Thinking (CT), responding to social, economic, technological and environmental challenges.

A SE with a Science-Technology-Society (STS) orientation that promotes CT is necessary, with updated teaching resources. New STS/CT teaching proposals are needed that actively involve students in problem solving, explicitly and intentionally providing the possibility of (re)constructing knowledge, developing skills and attitudes/values involved in STS relationships (Vieira, 2021).

In this context, within the scope of an ongoing PhD, Lithomobile 2.0 Project was developed. It consists of a STS/CT didactic proposal, focused on the essential learning defined in the Portuguese curricular orientations for Natural Sciences subject, 7th year of schooling (Direção -Geral da Educação, 2018). It is expected that during basic education students, aged 12/13, explore the Continental Drift Hypothesis and Plate Tectonics Theory. The proposal integrates four learning activities with STS/CT orientation for the classroom context, with teaching and material resources, framed in a didactic sequence structured in teaching/learning strategies such as “didactic games”, “scientific controversy”, “questioning”, and “scientific simulators”. The Lithomobile 2.0 Project is developed in a cooperative learning (CL) context, being an effective learning strategy in promoting CT (Warsah et al., 2021), centered on students, organized in groups, cooperating with each other, achieving common goals (Johnson & Johnson, 2014).

The Lithomobile 2.0 Project was structured into three sequential phases:
(i) phase I - Systematic Literature Review (SLR), identifying didactic-pedagogical guidelines and specifications that should present teaching resources with STS/CT guidance, based on scientific evidence from current studies;
(ii) phase II - design, production and validation of STS/CT teaching resources, and
(iii) phase III - implementation and assessment of a didactic proposal for STS/CT guidance, in a classroom context.

This study follows an action research, interventional and participatory plan, with innovation and change as its base purpose (Coutinho, 2011). This approach is both viable and coherent, as it focuses on curriculum issues in action, which were central to present study´s goal: implementing and assessing a didactic proposal with as STS/CT guidance – the Lithomobile Project 2.0 -, determining their contributions to the development of scientific knowledge and mobilization of CT capabilities.

During the implementation of the activities, data were collected using various instruments and techniques, subsequently subject to content analysis, mostly, and descriptive statistical analysis. The preliminary results suggest that the activities developed contributed to the development of students’ scientific knowledge, mobilization of students' critical thinking skills in decision-making processes and more informed actions.

Keywords: Science Education, Science-Technology-Society, Scientific Literacy, Teaching Resources, Critical Thinking.