[mathking]

As a teacher, the appeal to me of STEAM over STEM is twofold. The first is purely pragmatic. Aesthetics matters when you design and build things you want to sell. Teaching students that it is a completely separate issue from the engineering is putting them at a disadvantage. Just look at the markets for phones, computers and cars and tell me the Art part of design doesn't matter. A friend who is an engineer for a car company told me recently they ask a question of new hires designed to elicit their views on the importance of aesthetics, and they have decided against candidates who were dismissive of aesthetics as unimportant or not part of their job as an engineer.

The second big part of the appeal is that including Art makes developing creativity easier. In the last few years I have been an avid reader of the research available about teaching students to be more creative. The general consensus seems to be that students will become more creative if they are given more opportunities to be creative. Having open ended projects, or open ended parts of projects, is very important in providing these opportunities. I did some research myself about two and a half decades ago about visual perception. I found that some of the techniques used in art classes to teach students about perspective and shading enhanced students' visual perception skills. As an example, students who had taken drawing classes were able to more quickly and reliably figure if a particular set of shapes could fit together and how they would fit together.