Education: How art, design and creative cognition can re-ignite STEM learning.

DLD friend Idit Harel Caperton presented a paper demonstrating how art and design and creative cognition can re-ignite STEM learning at the National Center for Women and IT 2011 Summit on Practices and Ideas to Revolutionize Computing. In conclusion, STEM learning— that is education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—could well benefit from an infusion of art and design:

„Adding an A for art to STEM would give our technical and scientific education “some steam,” said my MIT colleague John Maeda, now president of the Rhode Island School of Design, by “grounding the bits and bytes in the physical world before us.” Paola Antonelli, Senior Design Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, added another element to the mix: “Art and design,” said Antonelli, “when used correctly, can integrate innovation into people’s lives.” STEAM and Innovation: They are and ought to be at the heart of both Computer Science learning and STEM education.

Constructionist Learning theory has long pushed for this approach of combining computer science and engineering with the sciences and the arts. We put it into practice at the Media Lab itself as well as in the innovative work we pursued in schools worldwide two decades ago.  The program was intentionally named "MAS" for Media Technology Arts and Sciences, and being highly interdisciplinary in nature, it combined architecture, media technology, arts, sciences, computation, design, music, and more.  In fact, Constructionist theory and the STEAM it can provide were the subject of my PhD thesis book Children Designers and underlie the philosophy of the products I’ve been developing since.

Most recently, my organization, the World Wide Workshop, has applied this learning theory in attending Globaloria, the social learning network for game-based educational innovation that has been actively changing students’ academics, lives and career futures in several states. By imagining, drawing and building original videogames, Globaloria students have been demonstrating dramatically how art and design and creative cognition can indeed ignite all kinds of STEM learning.“

For some examples of this technique and additional information on the World Wide Workshop and Globaloria, please visit Idit’s contribution in the SEED magazine.