STEAM Actually comming to FRC, and im not happy

[Cole Cyr]

Logging onto facebook today i found a post by FIRST Robotics Canada about a new award Called "STEAM Horizon Award" you can check it out on the page here:https://www.facebook.com/FIRSTRoboti...WSFEED&fref=nf

There has been alot of talk over whether adding Arts to the fold would be good and i just don't see how it could be. Let me start off by saying that Art is necessary in the world and has alot of impact on culture but it is also the most subjective field there is. I can take a photo that i think is great and others think is bad and there is no truth, both of us are right and wrong. I believe there should be no place for this type of subjectivity in the almost entirely objective fields of Science Technology Engineering and Math. Design is probably the only aspect of the Arts that could be useful and i think its already covered under the label of Engineering

The importance of art does not lie in any association with STEM, and arts are important for their own reasons unrelated to the the importance of STEM. STEM was created because of a shortage of people in these fields especially important for women, as there are still severe shortages in the number of women who pursue them. Arts suffer no shortage of women. The move to add Arts was probably to incise more women to join STEM but what it also does is make it so they can exit the programs not going into a STEM field but to an arts field where we don't need more women. If the idea is to bring more arts people into STEM then we should focus on making those fields more attractive to the Arts but keeping the exit from the program still a STEM field.

Robotics has been my passion for the last 4 years and i will stick with it no matter where it goes and i believe that we as a community can shape the environment to better it.

So i ask you, since this seems to be happening no matter what now, how do we incorporate such a subjective field into the FRC enviroment?

And what are your thoughts on this shift in direction?