Art-Based Innovation Teaching and Learning: How Do Students, Teachers, and Administrators Experience STEAM Education Online?

STEAM education, incorporating the arts into traditional STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths) studies, is spreading globally. The arts component is called out to promote creative and innovative thinking among STEM learners. As with any novel educational trend, STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics) teaching and learning methods have been predominantly developing in the offline settings, especially given the creative nature, softness, and tacitness of learning goals brought in by the arts. However, this global digitalization trend which has been further enforced by the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed the entire educational field to online spaces and STEAM studies had to follow. Given the relative novelty of STEAM, as well as the new normal of online settings that it has to adapt to, our knowledge and understanding of how STEAM studies will survive the shift to the digital era remain very limited. In this study, we analyze the case of a STEAM-based study program on innovation, which was conceptualized as an offline program before the pandemic and had to transform into a fully online format following the global lockdown. Applying the Community of Inquiry (COI) pedagogical framework we analyze in depth the perspectives of all the course participants—students, teachers, and administrative staff—their experiences, their adaptation to the shift into an online space and the lessons learned. Our study shares theoretical, practical, and policymaking implications on STEAM teaching and learning. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

School Personnel Lived Experiences Related to High School Engineering Education and the Covid-19 Pandemic

This study investigated the teaching experiences of three school personnel at a public high school during the 2020–2021 school year as they implemented a unique science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM) unit with in-person and virtual students in their engineering classes during the Covid-19 pandemic. A research team interviewed two teachers and one administrator at the school to better understand the nuances of pre-college engineering during a pandemic year and how changes in school and district policy affected the instructional delivery of STEAM projects. Narrative analytic methods were utilized to understand each participant's experience and an inductive content thematic approach was used to develop the findings. The participants described varied experiences navigating instruction during the pandemic, particularly when adapting hands-on STEAM projects for virtual or hybrid teaching. All three participants thought deeply about how to best meet the needs of students while attempting to support equitable instruction. The findings of this study indicate that pre-college engineering in the pandemic was challenging for the participants, but not impossible, and that this setting was an appropriate context for STEAM projects that provided students with a mechanism for collaboration and engagement. © 2022, Purdue University Press. All rights reserved.

Driving innovation through project based learning: A pre-university STEAM for Social Good initiative

The Covid pandemic is a clarion call for increased sensitivity to the interconnected nature of social problems facing our world today. A future-oriented education on critical issues, such as those outlined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and designing potential solutions for such problems is an imperative skill that must be imparted to children to help them navigate their future in today's unpredictable world. Towards this goal, we have been conducting 3.5 month-long mentoring sessions for pre-university students in India to participate in a STEAM for Social Good innovation challenge conducted annually by the Government of India. Using digital and physical computing skills, we helped children explore creative solutions for social problems through a constructionist approach to learning, wherein they ideated and reflected upon the problems in their communities. The children learnt the Engineering Design Thinking process and worked in online groups of two or three, from concept to completion. Despite the constraints posed by the pandemic, they explored creative ways to think about design and innovation. They completed a variety of tasks by making, tinkering, engineering, assembling, and programming to grasp the intricate relationship between software and hardware. Subsequently, the children showcased their creative abilities through video storytelling to a panel of domain experts. In this paper, we present the children's perspective of their experiences through this journey, the evaluation metrics based on IEEE design principles, and our learnings from conducting this initiative as a university-school partnership model for 84 middle and high school students. The aspirational intent of this initiative is to make the children better social problem solvers and help them perceive social problems as opportunities to enhance life for themselves and their communities. © 2022 IEEE.

Characterization of Spaces and Didactic Units for the Improvement of Diversity Gaps

Currently, most educational centers have specific spaces where, depending on the technology available in them, specific practices are carried out. Some examples of these spaces are the computer labs, electronics, biology, chemistry, or maker spaces. The CreaSTEAM project aims to create STEAM spaces in schools, so that they are multidisciplinary and transversal spaces where elements and technologies of all kinds coexist, and above all, rather than being focused on technology, they are focused on the development of STEAM skills and vocations, especially to reduce gaps in diversity. This article focuses on the design of an instrument that allows the conceptualization of STEAM practices in these new educational environments, contemplating and relating both educational methodologies, technologies, and diversity gaps to be solved or studied.

A study on the learning experience of visitors of digital museums in STEAM education: From the perspective of visitors' visual evaluation.

Public education in museums has the interdisciplinary nature of STEAM education contemporary learning. In the contemporary learning process of the public, digital museums can rely on mobile terminals to provide people with opportunities for mobile learning. Especially since the global outbreak of COVID-19, many offline museums have been forced to close their doors or impose restrictions. How to use digital museums to better carry out the learning experience of visitors is a problem worthy of attention. Effective dissemination of visual information can help digital museums conduct educational activities more efficiently. The purpose of this study was to explore a research method for visual evaluation of visitors' learning experiences in digital museums. The visual evaluation of visitors in the digital museum learning experience involves the layout of exhibition content, the form of exhibition space, and the way of display of exhibits. Through eye-tracking engineering experiments, we obtain and analyze the visual data of visitors during the educational experience of the digital museum to form an accurate evaluation. This method can be used to assess the visual satisfaction of visitors with the educational experience of a digital museum in mobile learning. This kind of evaluation research can provide strong data support and design optimization direction guidance for the development of digital museum public education.

The Effect of the Covid-19 Epidemic on the Self-perception of Training Needs in STEAM Lecturers

This work in progress research-to-practice paper presents the initial results of a study carried out at our university among lecturers, aimed at determining how the perception of training needs have changed due to the pandemic, and if this change can be used to increase enrollment in the university training program. Pedagogical training of university lecturers has usually been a self-training process guided by their own beliefs about what good teaching is, and the self-perception of one's own strengths and weaknesses with respect to teaching. The COVID-19 pandemic shook the world in many ways, but it also challenged lecturers about their own convictions regarding educational methodologies, evaluation and their own approach to teaching, so it is a great opportunity for change.

Integration Aspect of Training Teachers of Art Disciplines in Pedagogical Universities

The aim of this study is to collect the latest data on changes in the teaching of art disciplines under the influence of the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as to trace how this revolution affects the emergence of innovations in teaching. The ultimate goal is to find an approach that will help future teachers solve problems related to the technologization of education and new requirements of the labor market. A promising way to solve this problem is to implement the principles of STEAM education in the training of future specialists. This will bridge the gap between technical and creative disciplines, theory and practice, and make it possible to integrate individual knowledge into creative innovative projects. © 2022, North American Business Press. All rights reserved.

Adopting creative pedagogy for STEAM education in technology enhanced environments

Employing an arts-integrated Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEAM) approach to education benefits the students by triggering creativity and innovative thinking. By teaching through STEAM, the teachers can better make connections between subjects and students understand the interconnectedness of those fields. Introducing creativity through the arts when teaching complex topics aids students in becoming creators of their knowledge, as they can explore ways to make connections between disciplines and obtain specific information by taking initiatives, individually or collaboratively. The idea of bringing together the creative approaches of learning, and taking ownership of the learning process initially requires a creative pedagogical approach. This approach of teaching to be creative is claimed to be one of the most successful ways of learning [1]. However, integrating creative pedagogy into technology became a necessity as technological advancements have been transforming the teaching and learning experiences. Intersecting the creative pedagogy (the arts in STEAM) and technology-enhanced learning establishes new outlets of interdisciplinary teaching and learning. The recent global COVID-19 pandemic has caused an abrupt transition to distance education that required the integration of technology and digital platforms into everyday teaching because teaching and learning have started to happen in online environments. Such transitions have inspired educators to notice that they could adopt digital interventions in their classrooms. This educational design research aims to further understand and develop a set of digital design principles that aims to bring together interdisciplinary topics of STEAM by utilizing arts. To illustrate and demonstrate different levels of uses of these design principles, a multi-layered digital structure will be built. The design process is planned to be co-created by high school teachers with the consideration of how we could help and support students with diverse backgrounds and interests, and teachers with different technical and artistic competencies. The expected result is theorization and the utilization of the design principles in integrating interdisciplinary subjects through arts. © 2020 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).