STEM vs. STEAM

[mathking]

Originally Posted by jweston

The question we should be asking is not whether it should be STEM vs STEAM but what is the mission of FIRST? If it's to produce well-rounded individuals through robotics, go for STEAM. If it's to get more people to learn, love, and live science and its related disciplines, go for STEM.

Not sure I buy this distinction is warranted. It seems like you wrote a definition of art in order to get this conclusion but even so, how does this conclusion necessarily follow?

There are plenty of fields that are clearly in the STEM world, such as architecture, that are also clearly in the world of art. If some fields in STEM involve art, how can we say it is not a part of STEM?

As I said in an earlier post, I have a friend who is an engineer for an auto company. She has been paid to take art and design classes precisely because the aesthetics has become a very important part of her job. When her group is hiring they have interview question designed to elicit the interviewees ideas about the place of art in the design process, because that is important to them.

My own view is that there are some fundamental differences between art and science. Nonetheless, there is a growing body of research showing the importance of arts education in developing creativity. Note, the same research shows the positive role that good STEM programs also play in that. The key to developing creativity seems to be giving kids lots of problems in which at least some of the components are open-ended and require them to make their own judgements.

I am actually reminded of the debate in academic circles back in the 70s and 80s about watering down or fundamentally altering physics, geology, economics, biology, etc... when interdisciplinary computational science started to become a big thing.

I actually agree with you Sean, in that my big worry with STEAM is that it becomes something that isn't really about STEM. But as an educator I have the same feeling about many STEM programs. "Hey we are going to have kids use computers for things?" STEM!!! But that really comes down to the implementation of a program and not what we call it or include. Many, many supposedly STEM curriculums are really math class with a little bit of Excel and SketchUp in which students never actually design, build and test anything.

As an example, I have a friend who is a STEM teacher, and her sister is an art teacher in the same school. They do some lessons together. For example they have a lesson where the kids design a vase in Inventor and then make it on a pottery wheel. The kids in the STEM class are pushed to think about why they make the design the way they did. They answer questions like why did they choose a particular shape? They are asked to think about which designs they think are the best. The art kids are learning how the design software works. One of the most interesting parts of this lesson (I have observed it a couple of times) is when the kids are rendering the designs and trying out different colors and design patterns. The discussions that are generated are very interesting. It is also interesting to me to the art students learning about the technological tools that are becoming more and more important in the world of actual working artists. I have also observed a lesson on a day when the students are learning about two point perspective in art. This generated some fantastic STEM discussion about scale, visual perception and the best ways to represent complicated three dimensional objects.