STEM as an Art Medium
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| photo by Michal Zacharzewski, via RGBstock.com |
- STEM with a little art. For example, make a spaghetti bridge that holds up a certain amount of weight -- now make it pretty. Want to do this with your children? Start with some truss designs (Pittsburgh's Bridge website is a great resource), some spaghetti (the cheaper, the better), and a hot glue gun (school glue works, but hot glue is better). Some champion bridges like the Hoverla 5 are things of beauty.
- Art eye transforms technology. Art develops a new way of looking at the same old thing. Consider how MoMA Kickstarter's store reinvents modern technology in new ways.
- Aesthetic goals more than function. Some people look at modern art and say, "I know the artist is trying to say something, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is." Others say, "I know the artist said something to me, but I don't know how it was done." Art speaks to our soul, and STEM is a medium that some use with mastery, e.g. kinetic sculptures or Strandbeests.
- Art tells story of STEM. Art can also be the communicator of the wonder and beauty of STEM. That's what the Atomic STEAM Photography Show wants to do in their competition.
- STEM as a tool for art: Theater set design students can get a lot out of STEM knowledge for planning designs, creating special effects, and building strong and flexible sets. See how they did this at the University of Arizona.
- Art making the abstract concrete. Creative teachers realize that students need to "see" abstract concepts or hard to see systems. After hearing research about a dance professor who worked with a biology professor to have students dramatize the inner workings of a cell, I used the same idea to help students understand binary adders and why RAM is faster to access than physical disks. Guess my little stint in high school drama helped out my STEM teaching.
~ until next time, Yvonne