In a few hours, Hubby and I will be going to a STEM event at a local Community Center. A group I will learn more about received a grant to do a series of STEM Saturdays for students K-12. Today’s focus will be how to design and build cars.

I haven’t looked to see where STEM and STEAM originated, but became aware of it a few years ago when I did a series on local education for our weekly community paper. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math can also be Science, Technology, Engineering, Aviation and Math or Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math to give the STEM/STEAM acronyms. The intent is to try and make science, etc., “fun” from early on in order to guide children toward those skills. I actually used a passage about this in my novel,  “To Play on Grass Fields” . The point was made during a discussion about education in the context of children seem to naturally take to art, music, dance while the other subjects can be “scary”. I am a great example of that which I believe I mentioned in a post quite some time ago. My sister and brother were both mathematically inclined and I was not, nor were my parents. Our junior high school had two math teachers; one excellent and one not (You can guess the one I got). I was fine with ordinary math and the binary system and basic algebra were what threw me off track.  In trying to help me, my sister couldn’t grasp why I couldn’t understand and thus our “tutoring” usually ended quickly with both of us angry. At that stage, the accepted wisdom was, “girls don’t need to be good in math”. Since much of science is grounded in math and engineering certainly is, the simple solution was for me to focus on my talents. This is one of the reasons I firmly support doing everything practical to make math “fun” for kids. It does not mean I don’t support the arts and there are studies which show how music for example can be integrated into math. I don’t have the name of those studies at my fingertips, but will look for them to do a future post. Actually, now that I think of it, there’s probably a future article for the paper in that idea as well.