Quote:
Originally Posted by ArthurA
Of course not, but the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics are very closely linked in both subject matter and the issues that they face (but are still very diverse). Including Art, a field that is completely unrelated, and important for reasons that are entirely separate from the reasons that STEM subjects are seems disingenuous to me. STEAM is an acronym that loses its way for the want of including too many fields - it becomes a platitude that loses all meaning. |
I agree with ArthurA. Promoting art is very important, and as FIRST teams/STEM advocates we have to be careful to not disparage artists and those interested in pursuing it. STEAM is a useful acronym because
it spells out a longer word than STEM there are plenty of cases where Art + STEM are in the spotlight together. Just not all the time.
Regarding the theme, I'm... not a big fan. I wish FIRST would return to classic sports themed games. Western culture has such an innate knowledge of sports ingrained in us that when someone says "basketball but with robots" there's plenty that can be extrapolated and assumed right away. Even Aerial Assist can be explained as "kinda like football, but with yoga balls and robots," which is fairly accurate. Recycle Rush was a complete 180 in this regard. You can't really just say "recycling but with robots." And it was a fairly simple game, so you could possibly excuse this one because it isn't too difficult to explain with just a sentence. Stronghold was more difficult to explain to complete newcomers. "It's a castle siege" doesn't tell you much about the game at all. I guess that with a game video they're all pretty easy, but that's just a small nitpick I have.
My real beef with themed games is the cultural aspect, if you can call it that. FIRST's mission is to inspire kids to pursue STEM careers. I think we get too caught up a certain group of kids - the kids that already like STEM. When you say "hey, it's robots, but Monty Python/Steampunk!" I'd wager you're not going to be getting a larger group of interested kids. You might get more interest from certain kids, sure. But if you're trying to make robotics appealing to a crowd that is skeptical of anything uncool, adding a medieval or steampunk label on top of that is not going to help you one bit. This is especially relevant in more underprivileged areas* - robotics isn't doing you any social favors in the first place. If a school has a graduation rate in the 50's or 60's, I don't think the culture is super encouraging of kids who wanna be nerdy steampunk kids. It's difficult enough to recruit kids for soccer with robots, I'm not a fan of making that more difficult by recruiting them to renaissance fair with robots.
*disclaimer: i come from a pretty privileged suburban background, so feel free to completely disregard my attempt at empathy