Teaching STEM skills

STEM (Science, technology, engineering and math) are the skills and knowledge that form the foundation for the technology driven economy of the 21st century. Therefore STEM skills are very important for a successful career in today's job market. But STEM is much more than just the four fields of study that are taught in school. It is an integrated set of knowledge that develops critical thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving skills. You cannot teach STEM by lecturing or memorize facts but students must learn how to apply their knowledge to identify problems, design solutions, and solve problems. To teach STEM effectively, you may need to use “Learning by Doing” method with blended curriculum of supporting tools such as videos, short films, and extra readings etc.

“Learning by Doing” is NOT a new concept; it is as old as our human history. Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle had taught this method in ancient Greece that “For everything that we have to learn before we can do them, we must learn by doing them.” In the Renaissance age, Francis Bacon wrote: “You learn to write by doing it. You learn to read by doing it. You read more to increase your vocabulary and knowing more vocabularies you can read well.” But somehow in education, we choose to teach by lecturing and force students to learn by memorizing facts and formulas. The reasons is obvious, it is difficult to teach by asking students “to do something.” How can we teach history by doing? How can we teach literature by doing? Basically it is difficult to teach “learning by doing” to these subjects in classroom. However, in STEM, there are many “Doing activities” that students can learn by doing. You cannot learn science by memorizing formulas but you must conducting experiments. You cannot learn math by memorizing equations but you must solve problems. You cannot learn programming by listening to lecture but you must write codes. You cannot learn engineering by reading books but you must work on modeling. You cannot learn to speak a foreign language just by knowing grammar but you must practice by speaking. Basically with STEM, the best method is “Learning by Doing.”

For example, a better way to teach programming is letting students to write codes every day. I often start my programming class by given a short lecture on what students will learn on that day then show them examples so they have ideas of what they must do. We often have few minutes of class discussions or answer some questions then students are given a set of five to six tasks that they must do by writing codes. The first two tasks are mostly related to what they just learn on the lecture and similar to the examples so they can easily doing without any problem. This will build their confident about the class materials. During this time, I often walk around the classroom to answer questions. The next two tasks are usually more difficult that require students to think about the problems and analyze the instructions before they start coding. This will test their understanding about the structure and syntax of what they have learned. The last tasks are usually more comprehensive where they have to combine what they have learned previously and incorporate into today's materials. This is usually a short program about 50 to 100 lines of code where students learn to solve a problem. I monitor each individual student progress to find any student who may need additional helps. Once most students have demonstrated proficiency on this practice then we can move to the next topics. By breaking programming techniques into smaller components and let students learn by doing (Write code every day) it will make students to feel more comfortable and leads to a higher success rate.

It is important to motivate students by constantly remind them that STEM areas are where all the good jobs are and where the good jobs will be. Today there are millions of unfilled jobs in STEM fields all over the world and the needs are growing at a rate nearly double every year. It is predicted that by 2020, there will be three to five million new STEM jobs opening in the U.S alone. As a result, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has set the goal to train approximately 1 million more college graduates and 10,000 teachers in STEM fields in the next ten years and “import” approximately 3 million from other countries to fulfill the urgent industry needs.

Sources

  • Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University

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