Background:
Education has traditionally focused on the importance of content and cognitive goals and in this style also the curriculum design is made. While content knowledge is important to enter to the labour market today graduates need to develop also manual skills and technical literacy.

Materials and methods:
We set indicators of the intention to become a future engineer. One indicator can be the usage of hands-on activities at home and school, as well as the opinions about engineering education formed at the lower secondary school level. A total of 578 lower secondary students from Slovenia responded a questionnaire.

Results:
From the usage frequencies of different tools and performance of procedures, a large gap between home and school technics can be recognized. The results of research showed that practical and hand-on activities are, to a large extent, lacking in lower secondary education in Slovenia.

Conclusions:
The findings call for a redesign of curricula and a reform of teacher education towards more practically oriented and inspiring teaching.