Why STEAM teaching practices are important in a classroom?

STEM education is one of the most important aspects of education in the 21st century. A majority of the world’s jobs will require STEM skills and students need to develop these skills before going to university. Unfortunately, the idea of STEM is spoken more about, than the implementation capabilities in our classrooms. This blog looks at why STEM education is important, and how the National Educational Policy, 2020 accommodates STEM for K 12. Lastly, on a few hurdles faced with implementing STEM education.

STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. It is important that more focus be placed on STEM education, as this will ensure the success of future generations of students. These subjects have been spoken about for ages. But why is the importance given to them at this juncture in educational teaching and learning?

The reason is that these subjects have been taught in isolation and students would master skills in only one or a maximum of two areas of learning. However, in the 21st century, there is an urgent need to teach STEM in an integrated approach so that students are able to investigate — invent and inquire leading to impactful innovation. The human mind is constantly exploring to seek new answers and create new benchmarks. STEM education brings in the element to enhance the ever-exploring human mind to innovate and solve real-world problems.

STEM education requires to be taught as a separate subject as it is integrating concepts and skills from across four disciplines. This poses a challenge in many schools from different strata of society. Questions arise regarding the infrastructure designed to accommodate this learning process or even the framework of assessment to test children’s learning. The National Education Policy 2020 has made certain recommendations for STEM education.

1. An emphasis on Math, computational thinking, machine learning (ML), and data science will now begin at the foundational stage (at age 6).
2. Critical thinking and holistic, inquiry-based, discovery-based, discussion-based, and analysis-based learning will be the focus of NEP 2020.
3. The new policy seeks to encourage experiential learning. Learning objectives, and not rote learning, will be the focus in the future.
4. Online learning platforms will be developed using Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This will be done to address the issue of accessibility and also to promote research and innovation at all levels.

Though STEM education is the future for innovation and building a sustainable economy, it still poses a number of challenges. Firstly, the implementation of STEM education is cost intensive as it requires practical exploration, hence it is yet to evolve beyond the textbooks. This is especially prominent in rural India, given that very few schools have the funds needed to invest in the technology that STEM demands. As a result, the conversation about STEM education is limited to only a few demographics that have the funds to invest. Secondly, the youth must be informed and educated about the pathways to reach STEM jobs. Lastly, educational entities believe that the introduction of STEM Education will not help in completing the curriculum or syllabus in a specified time.

These challenges culminate by adding undue pressure on teachers who are seeking to find cost-effective and practical options to introduce children to STEM education. It is important to provide opportunities for STEM education resources at an affordable cost that enables experiential learning.

Tan90 comes in as a handy solution to addressing this problem, started by a group of young tech enthusiasts who are building a repository of resources to make STEM educational learning affordable and self-directed. Tan90 acts as the catalyst by collaborating the curriculum with their self-designed experiential kits that integrate science, mathematics, technology, and engineering. The kits make concepts relatable to real-life application for students to easily grasp and also caters to different types of learners in the classroom.

Organizations such as Tan90 enable the implementation of STEM education in schools across all sectors, making the playing field even for all learners. It is important to encourage STEM education because it will be the future of our country. STEM fields are important because they hold a vast amount of potential.

We hope that we can help you and your students learn more about STEM education by providing you with some free teaching resources via our website.