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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Am I the only one who does not get why the A was added to STEM? I thought stem was supposed to be a focus on science tech math engineering. Adding the arts now means everything? Isn’t that just “school”? What am I missing?? STEAM as an acronym seems really stupid to me.[/quote]
The "A" was added in education because some kids would come into a STEM activity and be immediately turned off and unwilling to approach the activity.  By adding art to STEM activities more kids are interested in the activity and it's supposed to be a gateway to getting kids interested in STEM.   It's supposed to make math and science less intimidating and provide relevance to something kids want to learn about.[/quote]
Does this work though? I love art and have nothing against kids learning and enjoying it, I just doubt that this is an effective gateway to science and math.[/quote] Sometimes it does. I have a middle school daughter who went to a robotics camp last summer. The other campers were boys and they built BattleBots that fought each other. My daughter and the one other girl camper decided to build a robot that would do a dance routine to a Taylor Swift song. Was that any less technically complex than the robots that battled? I have no idea. But they build an interesting robot and programmed it to dance to a particular rhythm and to do dance tricks. I'm okay with STEM being that flexible.[/quote]
(PP) to me that's a perfect example of a 100% true STEM. And kids found ways to enjoy and learn from it in a way that's unique to them. I just feel like oftentimes adding A is more like adding some coloring pages to a STEM activity or implying that STEM is dry and boring and needs to be soften to become palatable, this stuff annoys me :)[/quote]
Dance and music are in the arts.  Hence the addition of art to STEM to make it more interesting to middle school girls.  When all the projects are planned by boy nerds, they don't have the same appeal across genders.[/quote]

And to add:  appeal to ALL genders; not just the outdated and prejudicial, M/F binary. [/quote]

:roll: [/quote]

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