STEAM, STEM With Art Is Busting Out All Over
STEAM or STEM?
Why incorporate Art into learning Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (S.T.E.M.)?
The Answer?: “Grab Them by Their
Imaginations and Their Hearts and Minds Will Follow!”
I became a S.T.E.A.M. - "Engine of Ingenuity" instead of just a S.T.E.M. on a tree, so to speak, when I saw a picture of an awesome bridge.
In my mind's eye, I saw not the bridge, rather, I saw the equation of a parabola. That is when I started appreciating the mathematics of overpasses and suspension bridges.
“AWE …,” my breath would catch as I drove by a freeway overpass and envisioned the parabolic equation that represented it. I would modify the parameters in the overpass’ parabolic algorithm to stretch or steepen it.
I began to realize how the math actually was used; doing so made the math more easily understood. I gained an incredible appreciation for how Leonardo da Vinci saw the world and realized that S.T.E.A.M. had been around for a very, very long time.
I soon learned I could model real complex systems and images using something called fractal mathematics by describing the images in terms of repeating branches, like the “stems” of trees, as well.
“S.T.E.A.M. Engines of Ingenuity” are what I call us Science, Technology, Engineering, Art or Math teachers by sharing real teaching experiences. “Engines of Ingenuity” is a tag line from Dr. John Lienhard’s public radio and TV program KUHT, Houston, Texas.
I retired from teaching Middle and High School Mathematics after 14 years of teaching. But, long before I taught I was a die-hard nerdy S.T.E.M. student. And then, Dr. Lienhard, PhD M.E., University of Houston, gave me a little History with Art to aid the “design” part of me. Dr. Lienhard, bless his heart, taught me how the history of design can be glimpsed through art completing a machine or an equation by its purpose in its natural environment.
Try the over 3000 podcasts still available through University of Houston PBS TV. I personally got to talk with him about heuristics and found him to be an engineer's engineer. His tutelage enabled me to build up a head of S.T.E.A.M. to last for the rest of my life. I went onto a 23 year business career immediately after graduating from college; I became a “High Flyer and Rainbow Rider,” the proverbial “Kid in the Candy Store of Life.”
When I incorporated these visions and imaginations of real world images into teaching, something magical happened. Students collected and brought in drawings of geometrical shapes they had seen of buildings and freeway overpasses. They soon realized the math we were learning could enable them to have those images in their minds forever.
O.M.G., I created little da Vinci’s!
I brought models of the YF12A (later known as the A-12, SR-71 Blackbird) and told them to pretend they were in the cockpit with their hands on the steering controls. I asked them, “What do you think would happen if you dropped the flaps, right now, at Mach 5?” I would play with them by asking if they had their seat belt fastened and chin strap on.
They would look at me incredulously, when I would explain that if they didn’t have their seat belt and chin strap on when they dropped the plane's flaps, their helmet might crack the canopy. Eventually I would tell them to make me a paper plane model and put some flaps on it and see what happens to the way it flies.
Then we would work together to make some simple equations to explain what was going on when the plane flew.
Of course I had to lead them by the hand, so what?
After we did it once, they would remember part of it and try some of it themselves. That is when they became little da Vinci’s.
Envisioning art, opens the mind to reality. The mathematical mind then tries to fit what is happening with math models, kind of like putting Lego’s together.
O. M. G., start with a jumble of Lego’s and what you envision could end up being a Saturn V rocket fueled and ready to go to the Moon!
And of course, I would flash to actual videos, and turn the volume up so they could feel some of what the astronauts inside might be feeling. For a moment, they were in that rocket with them. The grips they had on their desks as they leaned closer to the video display screen showed how engrossed they were. They were obviously ... ALL IN.
I called the mechanism my 4M teaching strategy, for Mind, Muscle, Memory and Motivation. My simplistic philosophy reasoned that the more of their senses they could involve in the learning process, the more neural pathway imprints would be established from their learning. And you know what? It worked.
The first classes I had to teach were six classes of ESL 6th grade students. Straight out of a 23 year business career into a on the job training by teaching as I was learning the school district's methods. I winged it.
I had to because when I came into the classroom in late October. My students' teacher had disappeared having been in class only 20 days the first three months of school. The Principal had tried to make due with a revolving cadre of substitute teachers. For all my students knew, I was just going to be an-in-and-out baby sitter. The Principal orders to me were, "I don't care what you do as long as 90% of them pass the State test at the end of the year.
Silly me, I had never settled for less that 90% in my life. Now my goal was only 90% of them needed to pass with a 70. "No, problem," I nodded.
The first thing I did with them was to hold a paper airplane throwing contest. They were amazed when I beat all of their normal designs with a what appeared to be a stubby paper cylinder, which I threw as you would a football across the entire classroom. They had never seen such a paper airplane. The next day, I tested them.
I was shocked that the level of their learning was way below even their last year's grade level they were in. How they ever passed the years before was beyond my imagination. The classes scored an average of only 30%, without any one student achieving the minimum 70 for passing.
That was a very challenging year that actually ended with 87% of my students passing the State exam with at least a 70. The next year, the principal asked me to be the Math Department Head Teacher.
I believe in statistical analyses to guide my teaching. I used them to help students develop a plan for learning according to what they knew versus what they have to know. But, when I started teaching, I had my hands full. I did not have time to review research studies on successful teaching. I had to, as I said earlier, wing it.
Fourteen years of teaching later from grades 6 through 12 at 8 different schools, Principals asked me to teach for them to implement whatever I did to help the students pass. If I could have synthesized everything I did into a program, I'd probably be rich. But, it was very hard to generalize. You might say I became a teacher who taught to each student where they were and at the pace of their individual learnings. And I taught them to set scoring goals and plans to achieve them. Lastly, I taught them to help each other.
They were "Mini-Me's," falling all over themselves to be like their teacher. I didn't have to give students detention for not doing their homework. Instead, my students were Math Missionaries. They taught others and they taught them.
My teaching career convinced me that S.T.E.A.M. and my 4M strategies worked better that any research program I had ever come across.
It is my hope that some of the strategies I used will come out in this blog to help students and teachers experience some of the joy I get when I do and teach mathematics.
I was not always a fan of the subject. In fact, I didn't really appreciate mathematics until I got out of high school and college. I found that I could use what I had learned to help me in my jobs. I learned quickly that it is easy to lose your math skills if you did not use them and have to use them for a purpose.
As a freshman, my first college engineering design course in school was also the first time I had to use a computer to design something. Two years earlier, July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins had landed on the moon using an early guidance computer that if used today would be less useful than your cell phone. The only thing close to a computer in the early 1970's was a TI handheld calculator.
In my college engineering design class, I was working with shoe boxes full of punch cards; the computer was the size of a three bedroom apartment. Forget about CAD software; I had to tell the computer to do everything. I did not have a clue how to program into a computer what I was seeing, drawing or imagining.
I got a math book and I would look for
equations that would result in lines and shapes on a graph that seemed to fit
what I was thinking about. Only then
could I put the equations in the computer to help me design something, a deer
hunting blind, on top of which someone could sit above the brush or inside hidden
from unsuspecting deer; the blind weighed less than twenty pounds and fit in a back
pack no less.
Doing this becomes extremely important in today’s computerized world of augmented reality. Doors of creativity and imagination are opened wide. Reason and purpose are enjoined with innovation.
In addition, I would read stories to them and have them pick out things that could relate to math. This was a favorite story I read to them. That it was true made it easy for them to remember. (“Thank You-Rocket Man!”) Memories last forever when they are written and shared. Best of all is the invitation for readers to participate in the memories as well.
Art introduces the love of the real thing, and thus, of the math that represents it. It is a tool used to describe the world; descriptions replicated by mathematical representations that impart universal meaning. Art is sort of like visible paint of the calculus of life.
But, you know what? In introducing these ideas to my students, all I was doing was opening their minds to help them hurdle over incompletely developed thinking and cultural biases. Still, I always learned more and more about what and how to do the same thing over and over for the future. In some small way, perhaps, so did they.
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