Visual-art students use everything from laser cutters to customized desktop 3-D printers to circuit boards, designing projects “ with functionality such as special effects, sensors and other electronics. Geometry students code with Scratch to produce digital animations and create mathematical lighting plans for staging in a black-box theater. They not only design and produce electronic textiles, they draft, model, and print 3-D product prototypes and digitally render visual murals to be shared and experienced via smart TVs, projectors, tablets, and more. Students there learn everything from basic electrical engineering to industrial design and architecture skills, ultimately becoming designers of their own impressively high-tech finished products. The BAA lab is essentially a “fab lab,” MIT jargon for a makerspace, which is itself jargon for a community-centered hot spot with digital fabrication capabilities such as 3-D printing. At STEAM labs like the one at the Boston Arts Academy, students and teachers are wholeheartedly embracing the marriage of arts and STEM, and not just in dance seminars. Anne Jolly argues in Education Week that STEAM uses the arts as an “on-ramp to STEM for underrepresented students.” STEAM uses design methods to approach STEM subjects creatively and make them real-world-relevant to all students, not just those already interested. One of the main goals of STEM education is to break down artificial academic barriers created between the science, technology, engineering and math disciplines. This is the very problem being addressed by STEAM. But it is mostly in terms of diversity in the STEM fields. STEAM critics are right in a way-there is a major student engagement problem. Taking that first design class led me to not only teach better, but eventually pursue education as a career. The notion of using a design process stuck with me as I segued into math teaching and tutoring, in which I began designing curriculums for students with different learning issues. I became fascinated with that way of seeing the world, of owning a creative process while using technical skills. “ Design thinking” became my way of approaching everything that year-I couldn’t go to happy hour without asking my friends what they thought went into creating the bar stools they sat upon. We used math without thinking about the numbers, from scaling to modeling products to meticulously drafting prototypes with precise angles and measurements. It was about using a variety of skills and subjects to invent products. STEM/STEAM education combines the study of science, technology, engineering, the arts, and math into a unified learning experience that prepares students. Every class meeting was about problem solving, collaborating, and generating ideas. That class experience was something totally novel to me. Concerns that STEM does not adequately encourage creativity and innovation has led some educators to push for a broader approach. It wasn’t until after college, when I found myself creatively dissatisfied and wondering why I majored in economics, that I came upon a continuing education class called Product Design. Although the importance of STEM education is widely accepted, the growing emphasis on STEM curriculum has generated debate.
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