To be successful in a STEM career, not only STEM knowledge and skills but also creativity is required. Therefore, the arts have been integrated into STEM disciplines and subsequently designated as STEAM education (Sousa & Pilecki, 2013). One example of informal learning environments that STEAM education provided is a summer camp. In this study, middle and highs school students' use of their creativity in the Project-based Learning (PBL) courses was examined to determine students' belief about the use of the arts in STEM activities. The results showed that students believed that they used their creativity in eight of the nine classes.
Taking publicly funded projects in STEM education as a special lens, we aimed to learn about research and trends in STEM education. We identified a total of 127 projects funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the US Department of Education from 2003 to 2019. Both the number of funded projects in STEM education and their funding amounts were high, although there were considerable fluctuations over the years. The number of projects with multiple principal investigators increased over time. The project duration was typically in the range of 3-4 years, and the goals of these projects were mostly categorized as "development and innovation" or "efficacy and replication." The majority of the 127 projects focused on individual STEM disciplines, especially mathematics. The findings, based on IES-funded projects, provided a glimpse of the research input and trends in STEM education in the USA, with possible implications for developing STEM education research in other education systems around the world.
The challenges posed by STEM education are highly complex and require the efforts of both formal and informal educational approaches. Informal settings allow for greater flexibility for integrating across multiple STEM fields as well as allowing greater freedom for students to explore potential topics and skills within STEM. As such, informal STEM learning experiences not only develop students' interest in STEM but also influence their identity as STEM learners. In this paper we present and discusses a bridge design and construction project-based learning (PBL) activity that was conducted as part of a two-week STEM camp run by Aggie STEM at Texas A&M University. The PBL was designed around a real-world scenario that the students could tackle in a smaller scale as an initial prototype solution. An engineering design process was utilized throughout the activity and students had multiple objectives to meet. As the problem had no single solution, students could safely be creative in their approaches and final solutions, as they were not focused on finding the one right answer. Learning outcomes of the project were: 1. the reality of problems having multiple acceptable solutions; 2. the realization that the existence of multiple acceptable solutions does not mean that all solutions are acceptable; and 3. that there is room for creativity in meeting the design specifications with the allowed resources.
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