In response to the essential need for digital competences in education, a 3-year Design-Based Research project was conducted to prepare pre-service mathematics and science teachers for the demands of teaching in the digital age. Over three design cycles, an evidence-based course design for teaching and learning with and about digital media was developed. The interactions of 37 pre-service teachers with the course design were examined using a mixed-methods approach. Acceptance surveys, pre-, mid-, post-surveys and reflection journals informed iterative phases of refinement. This article presents global project findings and derives contributions to context-specific theories about teaching and learning with and about digital media. From this, key implications for higher (teacher) education are discussed, such as the use of scaffolds and teaching vignettes to promote self-efficacy expectations for implementing digital data acquisition and the use of the SAMR model as a scaffold for planning digitally transformed lessons.