STE(A)M 3

[SuperSalad]

Maybe I'm totally out of the loop and late to this party, but in recent months I've been seeing the mention of STEAM programs in the local education system. The "A" standing for "Arts".

Now correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't adding the arts to a STEM program defeat the purpose of STEM, which is to highlight technical fields?

STEAM appears to me like the traditional curriculum minus the social studies. So how long before it just becomes STEAMS and it just includes all areas of study, thereby completely making the distinction meaningless.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the arts and feel they play an important role. Why lump them in with STEM though?

Andrew H.

http://www.mototribology.com

 

[ornerynorsk]

Someone got butt-hurt and needed to feel included. Now everyone gets a participation award. My cynical opinion, yes, but it's a bit maddening.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

 

[SLTA]

The reason I was told when I asked a professor of a STEAM group was that women are underrepresented in the arts, too. Someone else told me it was to make STEM more appealing to women (insert massive eye roll - I'm a great engineer and a terrible artist). I said yeah, right. I never have heard a good reason for sticking Art in there.

BUT. For the last three months I've been volunteering with the STEAM studio at my local university, helping with the structural side of a senior design project. The students are from sculpture arts and mechatronics engineering, and they're working together to fabricate a very large statue that breathes and moves and will be prominently displayed this spring. That's been a cool juxtaposition of STEM and Art.

Please remember: we're not all guys!

 

[TheTick]

Analogous to when New England senators tried to declare that Lake Champlain was one of the Great Lakes.

 

[Fugeguy]

Its all good until HR demands "A" representation in every engineering department.

 

[SnTMan]

Art, that's easy. There's no specifications. Do whatever you want

The problem with sloppy work is that the supply FAR EXCEEDS the demand

 

[JAE]

There is actually, in my opinion, a lot of subtle overlap between art and engineering.

When something is engineered well, and you stand back and look at the resulting product, it can be a very beautiful thing.
Something the mind's eye sees as beauty with intense function behind it...without an intentional effort to make it beautiful.



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[SnTMan]

JAE, agree 100%

The problem with sloppy work is that the supply FAR EXCEEDS the demand

 

[SuperSalad]

The reason I was told when I asked a professor of a STEAM group was that women are underrepresented in the arts, too. Someone else told me it was to make STEM more appealing to women (insert massive eye roll - I'm a great engineer and a terrible artist). I said yeah, right. I never have heard a good reason for sticking Art in there.

So it is for sexist and pandering reasons which assume women need to be tricked into technical fields? That's even worse than I thought! STEM programs aren't meant to get women into STEM fields, they are meant to get students into STEM fields.

I'm going to pull a quote from the "Best Motivational Quotes" thread that I absolutely loved:

“There is no demand for women engineers, as such, as there are for women doctors; but there's always a demand for anyone who can do a good piece of work.”
-- Edith Clarke

If they are interested in art, let them do art. If they want to get into a technical field, let them do that. Neither are mutually exclusive of one another so it isn't as if once you are in a STEM program, you are not allowed to be artistic. If a student can't decide what kind of subjects they are interested in studying, I would guess they are either a) too young for that type of curriculum, or b) probably not suited for a focused technical curriculum.

I like that the program you are working on, SLTA, has a multidisciplinary focus. That is how the world works and it should be integrated into education. However, by lumping them together, I think it will hurt the ability of students to recognize the values in other's talents more than it will help.

Andrew H.

http://www.mototribology.com

 

[HamburgerHelper]

John Carmack ,the programmer, was asked this question and his response was that very little of what he did was art but occasional he would see a solution that intuitively was correct and that may be considered art. None of the work he does concerns game design but is solely optimization and maximizing the perceived results. I don't think I have ever referenced anything I do as art but occasionally, I'll do or see someone do something that I would refer to as slick due to the elegance of a solution and the understanding required to boiling down the essence of a problem. Using deep understanding to create elegant solutions is near art if it isn't. Anyone can muck up an overdesigned solution.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Along these lines of art informing engineering, I can highly recommend the feature-length documentary 'Objectified', by Gary Hustwit, of 'Helvetica' fame, another documentary worth watching:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1241325/

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
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The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[TheTick]

I think this is the equivalent of painting it pink and calling it "STEM for her".

there are lots of women who love math, science and engineering. They don't need encouragement so much as they need an end to systemic discouragement.

 

[truckandbus]

I think it is a reasonable addition in that S, T, E, M complement the A as much the A can complement the S, T, E, M

A friend of mine worked out the hydraulics for the prop movements for the Phantom of Opera

I think most engineers appreciate a well made tool or nicely designed interface

 

[swertel]

Much of this discussion started when those unfamiliar with the industry were trying to define STEM.

Science: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, -- certainly hard science is easy to define. Does psychology, sociology, and political science also count?
Technology: Computers. But isn't there more to technology than IT services?
Maths: Everyone understood mathematics and therefore focused on it as being the answer to all the STEM problems. Of course, there is more to life than numbers.
Engineering: Engineering is difficult because it is a blend of the other three. Not only that, but it takes creativity to invent or create something. The "A" was added, not to imply painting or poetry, but to include that not just analytical minds are required to solve the world's problems. Creative ones are too.

So, in order to resolve the uninitiated's lack of understanding of the problem, they created another subset. While I agree with the concept of needing to appreciate the arts to find beauty in the world, the powers-that-be took a difficult problem to solve and made it infinitely more difficult to solve.

--Scott
www.aerornd.com

 

[moltenmetal]

STEAM is a meaningless acronym.

What, are humanities not important? Languages? Social sciences?

Why not just call it "education" then?

 

[SuperSalad]

Why not just call it "education" then?

Exactly my point. When it loses focus, it loses its meaning. STEM was meant to be a particular educational focus. Not to belittle other studies, but to highlight those that were closely related and intertwined with one another.

Andrew H.

http://www.mototribology.com

 

[HamburgerHelper]

Maybe, they should be removing letters to discourage so many people from going into STEAM, STEM, or whatever you are going to call it. Maybe, makeup a set of words so the acronym is STRESS.

 

[CWB1]

Given that studying most of the "social sciences" results in a degree in the "arts," STEAM would seem to be all-encompassing.

 

[zeusfaber]

So why not add the "S" for Social Studies, call it "STEAMS" and then challenge the Toad (for those who live in other parts of the world, that's our ex - but his malign influence still pervades - Secretary of State for Education and Skills) to explain why his version of "Education" somehow offers so much less than that.

(I may just have overstepped a mark or two there).

 

[MikeHalloran]

the powers-that-be took a difficult problem to solve and made it infinitely more difficult to solve.

You are all misunderstanding what is going on.

The goal has nothing to do with solving any problem.

The goal is to make sure that the administrators who boss around the educators, can continue dipping their tools in the money streams that they try so hard to catalyze and influence.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA