Getting Real about the E in STEAM

STEM and STEAM are in the news. Researchers and educators in my field (cognition, art, and creativity) argue reasons for adding the A to STEM. While I visit this below, my focus is elsewhere. In this brief essay, I want to explore the meaning and importance of the E appearing in both STEM and STEAM. What’s engineering doing in this mix? And what are some reasons for affirming the arts when the role of engineering is clarified

Project Luminous: An E-Textiles Workshop Study to Increase Science Technology Engineering Mathematics/Science Technology Engineering Art Mathematics Interest in Middle School Girls

In this research study, young middle schoolers engaged in a stimulating workshop that seamlessly merged fashion with technology and electrical engineering. Students learned how to use simple hand sewing skills to create wearable-tech items using conductive thread, sewable LED lights, and sewable battery packs. The objective of the study was to increase young women’s interest in Science Technology Engineering Mathematics/Science Technology Engineering Art Mathematics (STEM/STEAM). Forty-eight middle school girls spent a day learning about the basics of e-textiles and building working products using their new knowledge. The day is split into three lessons. In lesson one students build a simple circuit keychain with one LED light. In lesson two, students build a t-shirt using the LilyTiny, and several LED lights. In lesson three, participants upcycle a thrifted or forgotten-about garment by adding custom circuitry.. The sample was made up of 50% African American girls, 15% Caucasian girls, 8% Hispanic girls, and 6% Mixed-race girls. Although there were some increases in interest in the areas of science and engineering, there were no statistically significant differences between the participants’ levels of interest prior to the e-textiles workshop intervention, and after participation in the e-textiles workshop intervention. As the smart-clothing and wearable tech market continues to develop, and new STEM/STEAM career opportunities emerge within the fashion industry, early exposure to e-textiles workshop interventions could potentially impact STEM/STEAM career interest in young girls

Effects of Movement, Growth Mindset and Math Talks on Math Anxiety

Mathematical anxiety is prevalent in our schools. This research provides insight into how mathematical anxiety develops and how it affects students throughout their lives. This study focuses on the mathematical anxiety and mathematical self-concept of five second grade classes at an economically disadvantaged school in rural North Texas. The study looked to see if adding the interventions of movement, mathematical growth mindset and math talks to a classroom would improve the mathematical self-concept of the children in the classrooms which participated. The study contained three classrooms of students who participated in the interventions and two classrooms which were used as a control group. All five second grade classrooms completed a pre and post-intervention survey of mathematical self-concepts. The three main categories measured by the survey were math self-concept, comfort using different mathematical strategies and comfort level with discussing and using math concepts in front of peers. The children received mathematical movement lessons on Mondays, growth mindset journaling and discussions on Tuesdays and mental math number talks on Wednesdays. After the four-week study, the results showed an overall gain in positive responses for the three categories, which were measured for this study in the intervention group. The control group did not show as much of a positive gain as the intervention group did, and in some cases actually went down in positive responses

Talking to myself: reflections on Reframing A conversation reflecting on my experiences of using creative practice (specifically the Reframing technique) within a STEM context.

open access articleThis self-reflective conversation looks back on my experiences as an Art & Design practitioner delivering a workshop at the HEA STEM Conference. The focus is on one technique, Reframing, as part of a wider discussion of the way that creative practice can enhance student engagement. The conversation explores different applications of the Reframing method across disciplinary boundaries, and refers to academics who have inspired my work. I reflect on the way that my experiences at the conference have impacted on my pedagogic practice, philosophy and identity, using a non-traditional and light-hearted format designed to encourage both my own reflective process and reader engagement

Transparency by Design: Closing the Gap Between Performance and Interpretability in Visual Reasoning

Visual question answering requires high-order reasoning about an image, which is a fundamental capability needed by machine systems to follow complex directives. Recently, modular networks have been shown to be an effective framework for performing visual reasoning tasks. While modular networks were initially designed with a degree of model transparency, their performance on complex visual reasoning benchmarks was lacking. Current state-of-the-art approaches do not provide an effective mechanism for understanding the reasoning process. In this paper, we close the performance gap between interpretable models and state-of-the-art visual reasoning methods. We propose a set of visual-reasoning primitives which, when composed, manifest as a model capable of performing complex reasoning tasks in an explicitly-interpretable manner. The fidelity and interpretability of the primitives' outputs enable an unparalleled ability to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of the resulting model. Critically, we show that these primitives are highly performant, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy of 99.1% on the CLEVR dataset. We also show that our model is able to effectively learn generalized representations when provided a small amount of data containing novel object attributes. Using the CoGenT generalization task, we show more than a 20 percentage point improvement over the current state of the art.Comment: CVPR 2018 pre-prin