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STEAM & Design Thinking

"STEAM allows us to tell our different stories and describe our diverse backgrounds."  
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Traditionally, the field of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) has been promoted to tackle challenging problems from multiple perspectives; however, there was an important aspect lacking from this mindset: creativity and abstract thinking.

 

To solve this problem, the arts were integrated into the technical world of STEM to activate and work both the left and right sides of the brain, thus creating STEAM. This new field works to connect the different areas of study and focus them on a common goal.

STEM

Utilizes the left-side of the brain

Inductive & Deductive Reasoning

Utilizes the right-side of the brain

Creative thinking & visual reasoning

Communicate abstract ideas

STEAM

Music, Dance, Theater, visual arts, etc.

Science, Technology, Engineering, Math

Problem-Solving & Critical thinking

STEAM is an integrated approach to learning. This process aims to teach students how to think critically and have an engineering or technology approach in tandem with an imaginative, design, or creative approach towards real-world problems while building on students mathematics and science base.

 

Using this model of learning, students often experience collaborative and well-rounded work environments where new ideas and projects are easily generated. For our team in Ireland, we experienced an electric environment with biologists, violin performers, political scientists, writers, criminal justice majors, and thespians. This unique grouping of individuals were able to conduct interviews, create a community engagement event, and choreography a dance through a collaborative design thinking approach.  

Explaining STEAM

Design Thinking is a five-step approach that requires practical and creative resolution to a problem. 

 

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Using this process, the team completed two international community engagement projects in addition to completing three general education courses.

Arts

  1. Empathize
    The work you do to understand people. To understand the way they do things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they think about the world, and what is meaningful to them.
     

  2. Define
    Bringing clarity and focus to the design space. To craft a meaningful and actionable problem statement.
     

  3. Ideate
    Concentrate on idea generation. You ideate in order to transition from identifying problems to creating solutions for your users.
     

  4. Prototype
    The iterative generation of artifacts intended to answer questions that get you closer to your final solution.
     

  5. Test
    Solicit feedback, about the prototypes you have created, from your users and have another opportunity to gain empathy for the people you are designing for.

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