The course Introduction to Engineering (ITE) at The Universidad Técnica Federico Santa Maria (USM) was redesigned to provide an integrated and formative learning experience where students needed to apply contents from other first year courses to solve small but authentic engineering problems, all related to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima. Meshed into the problem were exercises to practice study skills such as time-management. The results show that the approach not only helped the students' learning of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) topics, for example trigonometry, but also improved their confidence in solutions that they provided. Weekly student journals and a focus group organized after the end of the semester, show that this type of integrated course is a viable avenue to implement a STEM-Problem Based learning (PBL) approach, with measurable impact on learning skills and confidence of understanding Math and Science topics by freshmen engineering students.