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Educators have a unique responsibility to expand, while at the same time ground, [student] curiosity by developing activities that foster learning of various concepts, ideas, and ultimately prepare students to apply these experiences in real-world situations.
STEM Beginnings
Children have been taught STEM-related subjects for decades, from dissecting frogs to building makeshift volcanoes that spew baking-soda lava. Students use engineering and math skills to build bridges out of toothpicks. The problem is, most of this learning occurred as part of an education system that merely put students in a "box," with each subject taught as a stand-alone block of instruction and no clear connection to other areas of study. A new teaching and learning approach was needed.
The Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957 was the catalyst for setting STEM in motion, prompting congress to pass the National Defense of Education Act in 1958 (Jolly, 2009). The concern was that American children were inferior to Soviet children in science, and the goal was to create an elite generation of STEM workers (Passow, 1957). Over the years, students became technologically literate by learning concepts such as product design and manufacturing, problem solving, and consideration of technological impact on the environment and society in general. Guiding these new concepts is a pedagogical learning tool: Standards for Technological Literacy (STL). The four STL-related goals are to:
1. Establish a common set of expectations for what students in technology laboratory-classrooms should learn.
2. Ensure that the learning is developmental^ appropriate for students.
3. Ensure that the learning provides a basis for developing meaningful, relevant, and articulated curricula at the local, state, and provincial levels.
4. Ensure that the learning promotes content connections with other fields of study in Grades K-12.
(International Technology Education Association, 2007)
The STEM concepts and skills students develop are vital to their future success, both in the classroom and, most importantly, to meet the needs of today's workforce. STEM education differs from other traditional classroom environments primarily through the use of Project-/Problem-Based Learning strategies.
Project-/Problem-Based Learning creates dynamic learning environments, incorporates various stimuli, allows learners to gain valuable experiences that extend to real-world applicability, and should be considered as a primary delivery method in STEM classes. Scott, (2017) points out "PBL was first...