STEM To STEAM

[Songbirdo]

Good news, art students, your career as an artist is now on par with the hard science STEM fields.

 

Heard of the STEM fields of study? Now the Rhode Island School of Design is trying to add Art (art+design) to the acronym. STEM is now STEAM
http://stemtosteam.org/

 

I was in a meeting today and someone brought up volunteering at the elementary school to promote the STEAM fields. Having not heard of STEAM, I asked them to elaborate. "You know STEM? Well now it's STEAM." Art is now included.

 

I guess I need more sensitivity training, but I scoffed at that notion.

 

Is art and design important to engineering? Yes. But, I ask, are the high school students going to four years of college for art planning to work with an engineer or to become a famous artist and express themselves? The ones pursuing performance art, are they planning to use that as a presenter/salesperson or are they trying to go into theater/acting?

 

 

http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2014/11/18/ctq-jolly-stem-vs-steam.html

Here are a few ideas for giving STEM projects some STEAM:

• Design. Art can serve a practical function. Students might apply design and decoration to products that were created during the course of a design challenge. They could use computer graphics to create logos or stylized designs to include in communications or presentations. Through industrial design, students could improve the appearance, design, and usability of a product created during a STEM project.
• Performing arts, such as drama and speech. What about technical or persuasive writing? Those arts fit naturally into the “Communications” stage of the engineering design process. They would work well as part of a STEM project. (If you want students to get REALLY ambitious and creative, check out this video of students in Paraguay who made instruments out of discarded materials!)
• Creative planning. As students brainstorm solutions for an engineering problem, encourage them to adopt a playful, inventive, artistic approach. Calling on their artistic right brain can help them to generate more creative and innovative thinking.

 

So make sure you go to college and get that liberal arts degree. The STEAM fields need you! 

[Donnadogsoth]

I recommend the rump history and arts be combined with ceremonial magick and be called HAM.

[Maorio]

if they want to be part of the STEM field then force the artist to take some math classes at least, it's needed for all the other fields why not arts as well. would be fun to see how many of them wants to be artists when it requires at least a semester of hard math classes!

[Wuzzums]

Firstly, Gabe will stop this madness.

Secondly, each STEM field has a very clear definition, art has yet to have one.

It's just another marxist trick to add to the erosion of reality. Because the term "art" is all-encompassing its end effect is to put socialist indoctrination on par with mathematics. Noam Chomsky, of all people, has a great video on this phenomenon:

[Songbirdo]

Firstly, Gabe will stop this madness.

 

All hail Gabe.

[shirgall]

I recommend the rump history and arts be combined with ceremonial magick and be called HAM.

 

Sounds like a pork barrel project to me.

[Wuzzums]

All hail Gabe.

[Rventurelli]

Steam is a platform that sells video-games. Guess what, Half-Life 3 is supposedly going to be release this year or next one!

Having a STEM degree also does not guarantee anything. Cheap H1B visa people from India and other countries still steal your jobs. In fact, 35 percent of people born in America and are STEM graduates are unemployed.

[AlonzoTG]

Yep, I thought I was being really smart getting a computer science degree... I was even foolish enough to think it would give me a solid career that I could flip over into money for hobbies and business ventures... I've been unemployed for five years and have no prospects because I've been unemployed for five years... I went kinda crazy and spent my life savings upgrading my computer, which still retains the same ISA (instruction set architecture) of the first AMD64 processors released back in 2003, which is based on processor fundamentals which can be found in Babbage's designs from the 1840s, based on binary math from the 1640's based on mathematical concepts dating back to the beginnings of western civilization... Yet, after only five years I'm somehow obsolete and should be melted down and re-minted as a fresh new person who had damn well better keep his job or else become unemployable after six months. 

Every word ever published about the need for STEM graduates is a lie told to establish the groundwork for bringing in foreign workers. I don't even think there is a logical reason for this. The same companies that lobby for more onerous employment laws for American workers are the ones lobbying for more H1B visas. They have no concept of consequences and their forward-looking time horizon is the end of the next fiscal quarter. Either that or they're operating based on a malice deeper than I can contemplate. 

[jimofflorida]

stop all this silly talk!!! Sure I spent every day after graduating with my science and eng degrees keeping up with the latest technology in a never ending process of education so my skills did not grow stale within a year or two. I stood by and watched H1B visas take over entire industries in the US. But all that said, can you all not see the importance of how ART provides the perfect future we all dream of and we just do not need the H1B jobs!!!

If you cannot see that bright future that the academicians are pushing us towards now let me inspire you with this old potato that has a plaid sock on it while I dance to a cricket chirp while wearing only a skirt of Doritos bags I found by 7-11.. you see, all the problems go away when you just focus on art. I sure wish someone had told me about this 40years ago so I would not have wasted so much time on, numbers..bah...

(and in all seriousness yes, the H1B program should be shut completely down and almost every PhD level program in the country is run/attended by huge number of...non-US citizens)