Walk into any classroom today, and you have a good chance of seeing something just awesome in action. Children are programming robots, designing games, and creating a mess with experiments that a decade or two ago would have sounded like the stuff of science fiction. It is simply astounding how far STEM education has gone to transform the way children learn, and maybe even more importantly, the way they engage with the world in general.
What’s Really Going On Here?
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, but in a sense, it’s grown to encompass more than those four fields. It’s turned into this whole method of education that cross-relates ideas between disciplines, which is actually how the world operates in the first place. For example, when engineers design a bridge, they’re not using math in a vacuum. They’re coupling physics, materials science, computer simulations, and a whole bunch of other disciplines to answer a very hard question.
The magic of STEM in the classroom is that it teaches this interconnectedness. The kids can start with what can seem to be an innocuous question like “How do we make our school garden better?” and find themselves learning about soil chemistry, weather, irrigation systems, and even economics. It’s this sort of naturally occurring curiosity-driven education that excites kids about things they might otherwise have found overwhelming.
Teachers Are Learning Too
One thing that’s definitely notable is the level of support teachers are receiving (and require) to make this whole STEM thing work. STEM certification for teachers became increasingly important because, frankly, many teachers just didn’t have technology like this to learn on when they grew up. They’re figuring it out alongside their students in so many ways, and this actually helps build this fantastic collaborative atmosphere in the classroom.
Teachers are discovering that they don’t have to be experts in everything STEM to be able to guide their students effectively. Sometimes learning is best when they are all trying to learn it together, as they make mistakes and try again. It is very much like being all pioneers on the same path, and no one having all the answers to slow the others down.
The Real Magic Happens in Problem-Solving
What’s really revolutionary about STEM education is the way that it prepares kids to interact with problems. Instead of memorizing facts and formulas (though those are still handy, of course), kids learn to ask questions, experiment, and iterate. They might spend weeks building and rebuilding a simple machine, learning more from what fails than what succeeds.
This makes you strong in a way that regular learning does not. When your bot doesn’t pass the first time, you don’t just give up. You see what did not succeed, change your approach, and try again. That’s a pretty handy life lesson.
Seeing the Bigger Picture
The most important thing about STEM in the classroom is probably not even the technical knowledge students gain. It’s the confidence that they have in being able to fix difficult problems and understanding that they are creators, not just consumers, of technology. They start to see themselves as problem solvers and people who can make things better.
In a world that’s changing as quickly as ours is, that kind of thinking may be the best education we can give our kids. The jobs they’ll hold probably don’t yet even exist, but the problem-solving skills they’re learning will serve them no matter how things go in the future.