Toying around with STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art and Mathematics) Education
Maeve Liston, Mary Immaculate College (Ireland)
Abstract
This session will explore how exploration and play activities can foster children’s creativity and STEAM skills. Play is a process of doing, exploring, discovering, failing and succeeding. Toys reunite the fun/hands-on and minds-on aspects of science learning and thoughtful explorations with toys are recommended for bringing out the playful, investigative side of children of all ages.
STEAM is an educational approach that combines science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics. Students develop science skills through the application of both the scientific and the engineering design processes through STEAM-based activities and projects. STEAM education allows children to see an experimental world where everything they encounter can be subject to scientific exploration, extending the children’s innate curiosity and natural urge to explore their immediate environment.
The presentation will provide details of a project involving teachers, children and the whole school communities, exploring the ‘Science of Toys’, through a variety of innovative teaching strategies, for example engineering design challenges; exploratory play activities with commercially manufactured toys and the design and development of their own toys using the design thinking & engineering design processes. The approach taken during this project was to deliver STEAM activities with primary school communities with the aim of fostering creativity and thinkering skills through exploration and play.
Feedback from teachers showed that STEAM remains challenging for many teachers to integrate into their school curricula and making crosscutting STEAM connections is complex, requiring teachers to teach STEAM content in deliberate ways so that students understand how STEM knowledge is applied to real-world problems. Adequate training and support should be provided to the teachers in order to effectively implement and mitigate the difficulties that usually arise in its application.
Keywords: STEAM, Creativity, Design.